Discussion Topic

edward snowden just gave up a $100k+ job, his family, a girlfriend, a house in hawaii and most importantly physical security to inform the american [and global] public of what he has seen the NSA already implement and continue to expand. [edited pay down as initial reports of $200k/yr are likely exaggerated]

this is a leak that, if true, makes watergate look like a childhood prank. rather than being about some stupid political dirty trick, this is about the fundamental structure underlying almost the entirety of our contemporary and still emerging networked globe.

this is about confirming that the NSA is already very far along in implementing a previously secret, informational dragnet. a dragnet which, if one believes what snowden is telling us, harnesses archival capabilities that are mind-boggling in scope and breadth. using snowden's words, regardless of current intention, this informational construct has the potential to quickly be converted into an "architecture of oppression" and a "turnkey tyranny."

while it's easy to stick our heads under rocks and tell ourselves "why should i care, i have nothing to hide?" or to paraphrase obama "i'm not worried because i know the people behind the scenes and we can trust them" history has repeatedly shown that to take on this attitude is to be dangerously and self-destructively naive.

While you may be angry and not like what the government is doing, the initial post here misses the point and creates a fallacy. Let's start with the following which is not legally in dispute:

(1) The program, whether you like it or not, was based upon a law passed by Congress, executed by the Executive and approved by a Federal Court. Congress admits that it had oversight as required by law (even if some in Congress did not like the program).

(2) Based upon the foregoing, the program was, by definition, legal. Watergate was not legal. It was a crime. There is no comparison here. The only crime here was by the guy who leaked the information. He admits he did so to start public debate on what was previously a private debate (i.e., within the confines of confidential Congressional hearings, etc.).

(3) The NSA has a Whistleblower program and set of procedures. This leaker chose to not even attempt to follow those procedures. While it is possible the procedures would not have resulted in anything - indeed, it is likely nothing would have happened since the NSA program complied with the law - it is the obligation of the leaker to at least follow the very procedures that he lawfully and legally agreed to follow.

(4) If people do not like this program, the solution lies in a new law to be passed by Congress since they passed the applicable laws in the first place - creating the FISA court and passing the Patriot Act (doing so again in December 2012). This is why we have elected officials. Now to be clear, I think Congress as a whole is horrible, but the solution is to elect new officials, not violate the law. Alternatively, you should work to convince your Congressperson/people that the law needs to change.

(5) What this leaker did was an extreme act of civil disobedience, NOT whistleblowing (look up the definition - the government was not breaking the law, they were following a law that some people now do not like). Sometimes civil disobedience works out great (think the origin of the Civil Rights Act). Sometimes, it is merely criminal activity. While I am a strong privacy advocate, I believe this case appears to be one of criminal activity.

(6) Bin Laden used to communicate via cell phone. He then learned that we could and were tracking all of his calls. He then switched to couriers and other methods, thus making it more difficult to track him. Every time there is a leak of our intelligence methods, it makes it easier for the bad guys to do what they do. I wonder if people who claim to be against this program would continue to be against it if the program was cancelled, and as a result, we failed to stop a terrorist attack like 9/11.

(7) People need to understand what the government was gaining access to (metadata from phone records, etc.) and what they were not (individual names, addresses, etc.). The idea is that if the government already had information on an individual, they were permitted (and indeed required by law) to go back and get a specific warrant to then get that individual's information - which pursuant to the program, was already being stored.

Again, it is critical that people realize that there does not appear to be any law broken by our government. They were following the law. The problem, if any, is in the law itself.

(4) If people do not like this program, the solution lies in a new law to be passed by Congress since they passed the applicable laws in the first place - creating the FISA court and passing the Patriot Act (doing so again in December 2012). This is why we have elected officials. Now to be clear, I think Congress as a whole is horrible, but the solution is to elect new officials, not violate the law. Alternatively, you should work to convince your Congressperson/people that the law needs to change.

Congress passes a law, when everyone is scared and ready to give up their rights, and then the law is abused to collect information on everyone, not just foreigners, and the people don't even really know what the government is collecting on them.

If they did, this guy wouldn't be divulging any secrets rights?

So kudos to him and FU to the government who collects everything on everyone under the pretense of preventing a few bad guys from doing a few bad things.

Franklin said those who give up their freedom for security deserve neither. We are too far down the slippery slope already

^^^^ I don't cheat on my wife or do anything too illegal so I don't feel
any less private or free. We have no idea of how many threats or terrorist
attacks have been thwarted by this legal operation. I'm happy they're doing it.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet rights group, calls for a "new Church committee" to investigate potential government infringements on privacy and to write new rules protecting the public.

In the mid-70s a Senate investigation led by Idaho Senator Frank Church uncovered decades of serious, systemic abuse by the US government of its eavesdropping powers, an episode Glenn Greenwald has written frequently about. The Church Committee report led to the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and set up the Fisa courts that today secretly approve surveillance requests.

A statement from EFF reads in part:

Congress now has a responsibility to the American people to conduct a full, public investigation into the domestic surveillance of Americans by the intelligence communities, whether done directly or in concert with the FBI. And it then has a duty to make changes in the law to stop the spying and ensure that it does not happen again.

In short, we need a new Church Committee.

Read the full statement here. There's support for such a new push inside Congress, too. On Sunday Senator Rand Paul said he would try to challenge the NSA surveillance programs in court, and Senator Mark Udall said he wanted to "reopen" the Patriot Act, to clarify limits on what it allows. Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner recently wrote an editorial for the Guardian saying "I authored the Patriot Act, and this is an abuse of that law."

For those that say that we shouldn't be worried if we do not have anything to hide, at what point does price for "security" become too high? What other civil liberties are you willing to sacrifice at the alter of "safety?" How many more wars, civilian casualties in drone strikes, torture sessions and executions are you willing to endure? Do you REALLY think that we are winning the war on terror when the biggest casualties are the freedoms we give away?

I do not expect to change anyones mind with my post. America is in its final death throes, and I see a dark road ahead for Imperial Amerika Inc.

I find it interesting that I agree with many comments on both sides of this argument. However, for those who claim the program is "illegal" - that is currently an impossibility. The program was approved by a Federal Court. Therefore, by definition, it is legal. The Court's determine what is and is not legal. While an individual can certainly believe the Court got it wrong (being a lawyer, I often believe that to be the case), when the Court approves an action, that action by definition is legal. On the other hand, there is a clear argument that the law is being interpreted more broadly than initially intended - as often happens. As is always the case in such a scenario, the solution is within the legislature to pass a new law, particularly where the average citizen lacks standing to challenge the law. As for the Franklin quote, that is ALWAYS a battle that is going on with our lives on a daily basis. We allow all kinds of laws that impact our liberty in the name of safety. It's a slippery slope. We have speed limits, limits on weapons, license requirements for all types of behaviors and professions, seatbelt laws, security at airports, etc. The real question is where do we, as a society, draw the line? It's simply a cost-benefit analysis where there is no clear correct answer. However, I believe the correct answer requires that we follow the correct procedure. If one person dies as a result of this act of civil disobedience, there should be a murder charge against the leaker. That was the risk he took in making this unilateral decision. In the long run, perhaps he will turn out to have made the right decision, but it is a decision with real consequences that he has to accept.

With a warrant, the executive branch (cops, FBI, DEA, etc.) could ALWAYS search anything they wanted. The key was getting judicial approval. This current program obtained judicial approval. It is no different procedurally than any other warrant situation. If anything, this is less harmful since this information is not being used for criminal prosecution so as to invoke the protections of the 4th Amendment.

Again, the key here is do we want one individual to have the ability to override a decision made together by our 3 branches of government? If you are an anarchist, the answer is yes. If not, the answer should be no.

All of this being said, the cat is clearly out of the bag. Thus, people - namely, our government - now have to decide what liberty they are willing to give up for safety. Are you willing to have a computer view your Google searches if it saves one life? What is that life is someone you know? Perhaps, on the other hand, society is better off as a whole with more liberty and less safety - after all, we, as climbers, are generally willing to take personal risks to have a more thorough enjoyment of life when we go climbing. Maybe the balance between liberty and safety should be viewed the same way.

The ONLY solution I can see if to reduce funding to the government. As this kind of empire building and expansion is routine for even benign programs, we need to reduce all funding to all programs.

In case anyone cares, when you look at your paycheck and see how much they are pulling out for federal taxes, realize that your employer also pays a shitload, and that between the amount that they get from both of you: THEY ARE BORROWING 40% MORE AS THEY CANNOT BALANCE THE CHECKBOOK. You gonna let your children be on the hook for this?

Current debt per taxpayer is $148,212 (ie, YOU) - and that number is increasing daily.

The prism program was not "approved by a federal court." Someone did try to make a constitutional challenge to one of the NSAs programs about a year ago, but was thrown out for reasons of standing. You can't file a lawsuit without evidence under Rule 11. So if you can't prove you were spied on, you can't challenge the spying program.

I think if a case were properly presented to a court, this kind of spying would be unconstitutional. Their idea is that they can build a database of every communication of every US citizen, and have a detailed dossier ready to go if they need it. It's not a search until they use it. It doesnt target Americans because it doens't target anyone, at least the collection side. It's like the Bush-era arguments about torture. Absolutely nonsensical.

I'm ignorant of most of the policies that this event exposes. In that respect, what Snowden did is constructive as now the dialogue will hopefully be made in the public so it can be understood by the citizenry.

Precisely what, where, and when was the law passed that permitted the USA government to collect, search (i.e. scanning for words, phrases, ideas, people, thoughts, opinions, beliefs, etc) and store (indefinitely), every private electronic communication of every USA citizen to the degree that it is now being practiced by the NSA?

Precisely what, where, and when was the public notified in no uncertain terms that this spying (invasion and violation of individual rights, surveillance, intelligence gathering .... however you wish to phrase it [and the way that you phrase it is itself up for debate as it defines the nature of the activity]) was being conducted on this scale and scope?

Not a big fan of Prism, or other secret spying programs. And I do think this guy did do a favor to us.

However, it seems like he's having a little too much fun playing James Bond. Describing himself as a spy, when he was in reality a security guard and then an IT administrator. Saying his life was in danger, as well as the life of the reporters he talked to.

And was just listening to an interview the Guardian did with him. He was talking about how, since he was a sys admin, he saw lots more sensitive docs than the average CIA or NSA person did. While that's technically true, that's exactly the opposite of what you should be doing as an SA. You're not supposed to be poking through all those docs that you have access to because of your admin status.

Considering the theory of 6 Degrees of Separation, every USA citizen is linked to every terrorist and terrorist suspect. This places every USA citizen in the position of being potentially connected to every suspect of every national security investigation. This translates into a justification for examining every electronic communication or document of every USA citizen. After all, there may be info that pertains to the investigation.

Someone did try to make a constitutional challenge to one of the NSAs programs about a year ago, but was thrown out for reasons of standing. You can't file a lawsuit without evidence under Rule 11. So if you can't prove you were spied on, you can't challenge the spying program.

Maybe he did this so it could be challenged?

That Franklin quote is funny. At first it got me all fired up, but then I started wondering if it was just more political rhetoric.

These guys have been in bed with the bankers since the foundation of America, but when the declaration of independence was written, the big challenge was to get people to go to work and not have them feel taken advantage of, leading to protest. The politicians of the day, had to work a lot harder to convince people that the were in fact "free".

Now we just take it for granted....

Edit

It needs special protection. Between google and the nsa and the cellular companies? Turn you inside out... presto quicko, and expose your ass to the world. Yes, you.

You got that right. I just assume that any electronic communication is basically public knowledge.

I think it's important to understand that you can't have 100% security and then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience...

That is such a bs statement. Does he really think the people are that stupid? Three completely, 100% unachievable goals. He throws up a straw man to defend his administrations' 100% unconstitutional actions.

We have far too much of this attitude in Washington - that the Constitution is an impediment that must be defeated. From health insurance mandates, to national security programs, the Constitutional test isn't whether it adheres to the letter and spirit of our founding document, but whether there is a believable work around that the Supreme Court will accept.

In that process, the Constitution becomes little more than a speed bump on the road to tyranny.

If PRISM were only used to pursue terrorists that's one thing, but this administration, (as well as past ones) has shown itself quite happy to use the administrative state to harass its political opponents.

Doesn't mean they are doing it now like they are using the IRS, but they could.

BTW Obama lovers. I told ya so. How was I sure this was happenning before it was reported? Because FISA and the Patriot act made it legal..Tech makes it doable. Therefore it would almost certainly exist. Funny how many folks yelled at me for not having specific evidence. Some things are so obvious it simply blows me away when folks are surprised to find out it's happenning.

Generally when it comes to defense stuff if you can imagine it and it seems likely then it's already being done.

Another side to this argument I haven't heard. It seems to me like outlawing the nuclear weapon. The cats out of the bag.. the capability exists and any government now or in the future that wishes to use this type of thing AGAINST it's people will do so. No matter what happens to the current PRISM.

It is technology and the people need to use the same thing on politicians. 24-7 public surveillance should be the price of power. Well perhaps that is a bit extreme and unworkable. But I do think turnabout could be fair-play and have some positive results.

It's simply a cost-benefit analysis where there is no clear correct answer. However, I believe the correct answer requires that we follow the correct procedure.

There is nothing that's simple about an analysis that measures social benefits. I've been a part of some of those. What is the value of human life? What is the value of well-being? What is the value of silence or of clean air? Although insurance companies can calculate expected life earnings, what people will pay for more silence, etc., those are economic calculations that have inherent and incommensurable equalities. Avoiding fixing automobile gas tanks versus paying out a few lawsuits after intense legal blocking for design negligence are also cost-benefit analyses. Simple? How about "questionable?"

You would made H.L.A. Hart proud, Mr. Feldman.

Legal positivism has its problems, but not according to Mr. Feldman here. "What is the law is the law." Gee, thanks. Thinking and reflection are hardly needed in your world. Indeed, this makes the law and lawyers technocrats.

Ronald Dworkin had other ideas: laws need be meritorious; the coercive force that governments can use should be regulated according to conditions; laws are to be interpreted; the law (laws with other laws) must exhibit integrity to make sense; law is integrated with morality (that there is no separation between the two); how we come to know the law is more important than knowing what the law is; and the law (laws) should provide a seamless web.

Clearly not all the facts are in, but Mr. Feldman (an attorney, apparently) has already convicted the accused.

Before you all get your knickers in a twist it's worth noting that the article quoted in the OP was from a UK newspaper. The concern it expresses is that only US citizens are protected by US law, UK citizens have no privacy protection in the US over use of this data and there is the potential for UK surveilance authorities to dodge UK privacy law in some way by accessing Prism data. We are assured by the UK government that this isn't happening. Ho ho.

Mike, I do not convict anyone. Rather, I see an individual who signed a contract swearing secrecy, and then intentionally taking documents to which he was not entitled to take, and disclosing those documents in violation of not only his contract (with its confidentiality provisions), but also in violation of Federal law which makes the disclosure illegal. I leave it to a Court to convict if charged. Do not, however, confuse liability for breaking the law and doing the right thing. They are often different. Surely we would all break the law to save someone's life we care about. We would then have to face the consequences for doing so, and hope the Court's would have mercy on us. The most simple situation is speeding to the hospital to bring someone dying. We would all do it without regard to running read lights or exceeding the speed limit. It would still be illegal. We would just hope/assume that nobody would try to punish us. That is what the leaker did here.

As for the Court which approved it, it was the FISA Court. The Judges on the FISA Court are the same Federal judges that serve on the rest of our Federal Courts - appointed by the President with approval from the Senate. They are assigned to the FISA Court by the US Supreme Court on a rotating basis. Like all Federal judges, they have lifetime tenure, and thus, are technically immune from political hacks. The programs were approved by the FISA Court from what I have read.

I am all for privacy rights. I do not yet have a full understanding of how this information was used. None of us do. Thus, I have no idea (and neither do any of you) of whether the programs overreached. I am just trying to deal with the facts as we know them. Those facts are pretty clear (albeit quite limited). I do not trust the government as a whole. I do not trust Congress to do their job as they are too strongly influenced by lobbyists and money. I work in the Judicial system, and while there are plenty of horrible judges, I trust them to not be corrupt. If we want more privacy and more liberty, we need to push for same with our legislatures. We need to push the issue, and present informed arguments as to why giving up some security is worth it for the sake of liberty. This IS a slippery slope in either direction. If our spy programs are all public, they are not spy programs. If we give up all liberty, then what are we fighting to protect anyway? I am also interested to know if ANYWAY has been harmed by this program. In theory, we should be considering who was harmed, the cost of the program and what benefits the program has produced. Of course, this should have all been done by those in Congress who are required, and lawfully authorized, to oversee the program. This is NOT something that the public should reviewing (as opposed to debating the overall issue which has been in the public eye since 9/11) anymore than we should be reviewing battle plans, or criminal investigations in general.

For all those who are now complaining about the program, I am curious whether you were raising outrage and trying to do something about it after 9/11 when the Patriot Act was passed, or when it was renewed this past December. Hell, I wonder if people will make this an issue now. Many elections are coming up. We, as citizens in the US who are able to vote, have a duty to stand up, be heard and vote at election time. If we fail to do so, we cannot then be heard to complain about the actions of our legislators. Maybe this will be a lesson for the 45% (approx) of our population who fails to even vote in a Presidential election.

Been against it since the patriot(TREASON) act was proposed. Wasn't hard to figure out where it was all going. never understood how the death of 3000 people warranted spitting on the sacrifice of about 1 million American soldiers who so many like to say "died for our freedom"

As Franklins basically said. Those who sacrifice freedom for liberty will lose both.

Another guy who i think might have been an alpinist and made pretty good beer stated. "give me liberty or give me death"

Lately I find myself gagging when the National anthem is sung and the words "home of the brave" come along.

Was terribly crushed when candidate then SENATOR Obama voted for telecom immunity. I was actually begginning to believe in him until then... thats when I realized democracy in the USA was dead.

Still messy and ambiguous to me, but as you say, I don't know all about the specific laws in question, execution, oversight, and the facts. I wrote about some jurisprudence issues that stood out to me, which probably will never see the light of dialogue here.

(I'm not exactly for positivism in almost any form, as you might tell.)

"It's legal" is not a good argument on the side of the government. Let's say that it is legal for the cops to ask for a warrant to search your house and it is legal for a judge to evaluate their request and issue that warrant. No where in the law is there a clear and definitive line drawn as to what constitutes probable cause and illegal search and seizure; it is all a matter of court opinion. The only recourse if a judge gets a little too generous with search warrants is to point it out, have lawsuits in federal courts, etc. There is no law that can be changed to make a judge act within the constitution.

So although the FISA court allowed this, that does not mean that the actions of that court are constitutional. There is certainly no law that limits what they FISA court can and cannot approve. What they decide is just a matter of their anonymous opinion.

Since we have no way to see any of this happening, there is no way for the public to act as a deterrent to an over-zealous or even tyrannical court.

So maybe it's not legal. Maybe peoples civil rights have been trampled on and everyone who knows about it is just fine letting it happen because they are the ones interpreting the law.

I see an individual who signed a contract swearing secrecy, and then intentionally taking documents to which he was not entitled to take, and disclosing those documents in violation of not only his contract (with its confidentiality provisions), but also in violation of Federal law which makes the disclosure illegal.

And I see a Gov't that does not abide by the laws its Congress creates. And then, when an individual exposes the breach of laws by those at the top levels of the Gov't, they imprison the ones who expose them.

The military trial of Bradley Manning is a judicial lynching. The government has effectively muzzled the defense team. The Army private first class is not permitted to argue that he had a moral and legal obligation under international law to make public the war crimes he uncovered. The documents that detail the crimes, torture and killing Manning revealed, because they are classified, have been barred from discussion in court, effectively removing the fundamental issue of war crimes from the trial. Manning is forbidden by the court to challenge the government’s unverified assertion that he harmed national security. Lead defense attorney David E. Coombs said during pretrial proceedings that the judge’s refusal to permit information on the lack of actual damage from the leaks would “eliminate a viable defense, and cut defense off at the knees.”

If you are young and happen to live 80+ years as you have a fair chance to.. YER STILL GUNNA DIE!

And if you do live that long you will live through the death of around 8 to 10 BILLION people.

Now as climbers we tend to SAY we embrace the idea that quality is worth the risk of quantity when it comes to life. Some of us DIE based on that choice.

The leaker is my hero. Even though he is probably a bit odd and unstable. He probably spoke up in vain. America will continue to give up freedom for the security to live crappy lives full of fear and and weekends away from jobs they hate and can barely eek out a living with. Scrapping and squabbling in crappy little concrete jungles.

Did you all forget that this was exposed in 2007. It started soon after we signed our rights over to Big Brother under the [un]Patriot Act.
At times they (NSA, FBI, DHS et al) have changed the name of it so they could claim that they stopped a particular program. But or course the general practice never stopped expanding and now it's expanded 100-fold.

Don't even dream that they are only looking at comms of foreigners. In order to do that, first they have to screen everything. And if you have ever made a foreign call or email, or looked at a foreign website, you are now a suspect.

1997 I was a Central Office Supervisor overseeing 25 offices for one of America's notable Telcos.

We received internal orders to build unrestricted T1 lines into each offices Administrative and Control Panel which gave direct access to all traffic points that originated and terminated within that particular Central Office.

In simpler terms - these access portals gave the end user unfettered access to every landline call, every data link transfer, every encrypted DSL transmission that occurred in real time.

Curious as to who ordered such unprecedented access, we were only told that concerned government agencies had been granted access and to comply with the build request and consider these connections to be off-limits to all Telco personnel unless directed otherwise by no less than a regional VP.

Being the snoopy people that we were, we backtraced these connections through numerous jump links and eventually tracked them to Virginia - home of many a nefarious federal agency.

Through undetected monitoring, we determined that these unnamed agencies were capturing and in essence, bugging potentially every call process that occurred within our offices.

I was not surprised , but I was disappointed that my own country feared the general citizen to the degree that they would monitor all that we said, heard or sent over the public network.

I have tried to resist posting on this thread...I worked in the business for over 30 years. I signed god knows how many secrecy oaths under Title 18. I still take them seriously, even 10 years later. if you believe the system s being abused, you have a choice: file a complaint within the system, either the Whistleblowers office or the Inspector General, or resign and shut up. You might want to believe that these offices are in charge of whitewashing...except that I know for a fact that they go a bit apeshit over privacy.

As a contractor, I NEVER had the right or authority to violate need to know by divulging classified information, including sources and methods, even if I didn't agree with them. It was a promise that I made to my government and in effect TO EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU. Snowden took those same oaths, and in my book, he's no hero.

Snowden isn't risking his life, he's only risking his freedom, and IMHO, he should lose it. Of one thing I am certain...we cannot allow personnel that have taken secrecy oaths to make up their own rules about what information can or should be divulged. We know what's at stake when we sign them, and no one has ever put a gun to my head in the process of signing.

I know some of you might disagree, but frankly, there are things of which you just have no need to know. You might like to know, or wish you knew, but that's just not the way we work, and for the most part, you've all survived quite well not knowing the details.

I cannot/willNOT speak for Prism or NSA. I will tell you that NSA takes their responsibility under USSID 18 very seriously.

K-Man, my understanding of the testimony to which you cite is that the "communications" have a specific meaning in the intelligence community - namely, specific verbal or written communications being "intercepted" by a human. The programs at issue do not involve this from what I understand. I also understand that if they (the NSA) wants to have a human review any of the actual communications, they first have to go back and get a specific warrant. So was the testimony theoretically misleading to someone who does not know the proper terminology? Surely. Was it false? Apparently not. That being said, I assume most of the Congressional testimony we hear on all issues is pretty much BS or mere posturing.

In any event, after reviewing most of these postings, it is clear that most people are merely stating their opinion as to whether or not they like the program. If they do, then the leaker is a criminal. If they do not, then the government is breaking the law and the leaker is a hero. Such positions are generally falsely based. As things stand, the Patriot Act is legal. As things stand, a Constitutional Court approved the spy program, and thus, it IS Constitutional. That is the way our system works. This does not mean you need to like the law or the Court's interpretation, but it IS the law and it IS Constitutional. The remedy is to overturn the law or ask the Executive branch to not exercise its rights under the law - both of which are acceptable. People have to stop confusing their dislike of this program, or dislike of the Patriot Act, or dislike of the government, with what the law or the Constitution allows.

In addition to all of this, I find it curious that people are ok with going through X-ray machines, having their bags opened, going through pat-downs, etc. (often just to use public places), but they are outraged by a computer scanning their phone calls or Internet searches - which they claim they did not even know about anyway. I was just on a climbing trip and had every item in my carry-on backpack opened and studied, including each individual food bag, etc. It took a while. It was a pain. Yet, I told the person doing the search that I was glad they were at least being thorough. Did it make me feel that the terrorists got a small victory? Absolutely. I lost some freedom of movement. I have to get to Court earlier so my bag can be searched. This means less time doing other things. It sucks. However, it is not illegal. It is a price we pay to feel safe and be safe.

There can be no dispute that there is a fine line between balancing individual liberty and freedom versus security and safety. In making this analysis - which is quite individual - we need to consider whether we would rather be free, but scared from attacks, or lose some liberty, but feel safe. This answer may vary depending on where you live. I watched the second plane hit the Twin Towers on my way to work on 9-11. Many people in my town died that day. My wife works in NYC. I worry about future terrorist attacks, thus, I am willing to give up a little liberty to feel safe for me and my family (which I do). Someone living in a small mountain town may not have the same personal safety concern because terrorist attacks on their community may seem more remote.

Finally, if we are going to have this debate, we all need to understand that there are clearly valid views and positions on both sides of the argument. There is no clear cut solution to the liberty v. safety argument. Different strokes for different folks.

When I read that global temps are now predicted to increase 9 degrees F by 2020, I am reminded that there are far larger issues getting ignored, and we should be focusing more on such big picture and survival issues instead of a lawful spy program that has yet to harm anyone (at least, not that I have heard of). So when you decide to vote or call your Congress representative to complain about the spy program and ask for a change in the law, let them know they also have to do something about CO2 emissions and pollution. Far more people will die due to Climate Change than terrorist attacks or spying on terrorists (or potential terrorists).

Why did he run to China? Why is Russia offering him asylum? Two questions that bring an odd feel to this.

They are just doing what we do all the time to them. Protecting the politically persecuted. America does political imprisonment too. But like the Chinese we like to claim the prisoner broke our law. Whether our law is just or not.

As far as I know, the NSA stretched the law by collecting communication records on US citizens
without a prior warrant--with our without a machine.

Certainly, highly-paid layers will finagle down to a micro-letter that the law does not specifically
state that the NSA stretched beyond the law, but I do believe we all know the intent of the law.

Bats squeeze through 1/4" openings, and that's akin to what layers do with the law, they find ways to
squeeze through the smallest of openings to deem something legal or illegal, the letter of the
law opposed to the spirit of the law.

Why am I so concerned about the NSA leak? I don't need to worry if I don't do anything "wrong," right?

"Wrong" as in attend a peaceful protest against a war, or any other Gov't activity I may want to
stand against. Perhaps I want to show appreciation for the cause behind the Occupy movement.
And when I do, I will be labeled a terrorist and have my electronic communication combed like
Lady Gaga's hair.

"Every single time any major media outlet reports on something that the government is hiding,
that political officials don't want people to know, such as the fact that they are collecting
the phone records of all Americans, regardless of any suspicion of wrongdoing, the
people in power do exactly the same thing," Greenwald said. "They attack the media as the
messenger and they are trying to discredit the story."

cyber war is lately being used as a goofy name for the ancient art of spying. Something all nations do to one another. It isn't war until it is used to do direct damage. I havn't heard that China is accused of anything more than data collection. Could be wrong.

Funny how the laws of nations allow spying via diplomatic cover but the laws for their people do not.

A quick calculation of the phone "metadata":
300 million people making 10 calls a day. We harvest source phone, destination phone, time and length. Each can be stored as a 32 bit integer, 16 bytes per call. I get 48 Gb per day; would fill my hard drive in 4 days. Have no idea how accurate 10 calls per day is.

A totalitarian government occupies every aspect of your life. We are getting there.

Snowden is a hero for sure. To paraphrase Daniel Ellsberg, "at great risk to himself, Snowden has conferred an incalculable benefit on our democracy".

For those of you critical of Snowden, those of you so willing to give up all privacy, and possibly all liberty, for the sake of some safety, how did you become rock climbers? Doesn't your strong preference for safety dictate you stay at home on the couch and surf the tube?

Of course we were being spied on since the Bush admin. Nothing new, Obama's crew just kept it going. Patriot act everyone!

And I'm sorry but how does a high school dropout and military failure like this guy manage to earn top secret CIA security clearances with a $200K job? Not even Carrie Mathison can get that. And she's not real.

Fluoride, as public education is in large part an exercise in conformity, very smart people sometimes have great difficulty in school. They choose not to conform. Did you watch Snowden's video? He is quite aritculate and clearly very bright.

I suggest you read Wild Bill Donovan, the founder of the OSS. The OSS
didn't do much spying on US citizens, that was J Edgar Hoover's portfolio,
which we all know he carried out with a vengeance. The stuff he did makes
anything the NSA is doing look a very weak sauce.

Just did the math, ~80 bytes per text times 7 texts a day times 300 million cell phones... 65 terabytes a year for just texts. Really not that much. Add in pictures/photos and it skyrockets, tho. I have 2 terabytes on my 4-year old home PC, FYI.

The phone call records fishing expeditions were the main focus of the hearings lately. But that is only the tip of the iceberg, as Snowden told. They aren't going to discuss in open hearings most of what they do.
What is the difference between searching the content of all internet comms and searching every house?

Separately, - if they are going to look at all comms, why is the policy itself classified? It's one thing to classify the actual infomation gained, but in a democracy the people need to know how the government works.

did you see what they are doing to Bradley Manning? 3 years in prison (before trial). 23 hour a day in solitary. Talking of death penalty. Trumped up charges that in no way fit the crime.

Of course there is always the possibility he in on a CIA mission, and all the press is just put out in order to get the trust of the Chinese. In the world of spooks, you can never know in the end who is who.

But as to the wire tapping, I think the only way for civil disobedience to bring this sh#t down is if we all start peppering our emails and phone calls with words like "bomb", "terror", smuggle, timer..... You get the idea. 300 million false alarms a day would shut them down I'm sure. I wonder if the Prism system will pick me up now. lol

People who "leak" classified information are traitors. No more, no less. The whole point of having secret or top secret clearances are that you swear to keep the information limited to those with proper clearance. Do you really want to live in a country where each individual decides on their own which "secret" is worth keeping, or which should be shared?

Do you really want to live in a country where each individual decides on their own which "secret" is worth keeping, or which should be shared?

Do you want to live in a country where good people sit by and watch the government abuse their power? If your boss asked you not to tell as he pocketed charitable donation dollars, would you speak up? Who is the traitor, the one doing the will of the democracy or the one spying on citizens?

"Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian[1] novel by George Orwell published in 1949. The Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public mind control, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (Ingsoc) under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as thoughtcrimes.[2] Their tyranny is headed by Big Brother, the quasi-divine Party leader who enjoys an intense cult of personality, but who may not even exist. Big Brother and the Party justify their rule in the name of a supposed greater good."

"People who "leak" classified information are traitors. No more, no less. The whole point of having secret or top secret clearances are that you swear to keep the information limited to those with proper clearance. Do you really want to live in a country where each individual decides on their own which "secret" is worth keeping, or which should be shared?"

Totally agree. He signed on to the process. Punishment will happen if he is caught. Senate and Congress and President(s) all know it's going on. If you don't want it to happen elect different people......

I can only speak for myself. I've worked in positions where I held top secret clearance. I will take that knowledge with me to the grave. I didn't even discuss it with my parents or spouse. I've never been in the position of having to support something I didn't believe in, or believed was morally wrong.

If I did, I would do the honorable thing and quit my job (and still keep my damn mouth shut). If it was so egregious that I felt the system was being abused, I'd have reported it through the proper channels. If that didn't resolve things to my satisfaction, tough sh#t. Your option is to not "be a part of it". Quit. Stop sucking at the government tit you so hate. If what the government is doing is so wrong, and everyone who works on the program knows it's wrong, and they all quit, then the program won't function will it? But, what about people who won't quit? Hmmm, maybe this isn't a big, bad government issue, but a greedy people without moral compass issue?

This is a tough one. As I said earlier, I think the govt is abusing its power beyond what it needs to, and being less transparent than it could be.

And to give Snowden some credit, he does seem to have been a bit more discriminating than Manning about what he disclosed. Manning included docs that named actual sources...putting those people in danger. Snowden disclosed a program that he didn't agree with. And one where the disclosure doesn't probably immediately endanger anyone.

But it does seem to me that he has done a bunch of exaggeration about his personal situation and his likely level of access/control. That makes me a little suspicious. Going to China is also a little dubious.

The fact that vacuuming American phones and internet by this STRATCOM/NSA
program had to be approved in secret by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court (known as FISA), created to provide secret judicial oversight of the
intelligence community actions outside the USA,

indicates that the system of checks and balances installed to prevent abuses
and overreach does not work. In other words, ending the surveillance will
not be sufficient. The bad law, the process, and the people involved that

allowed total domestic surveillance systems to be brought online
-- a creation of the so-called Patriot Act, a truly Orwellian nomenclature

The DNI provided testimony before the Senate indicating that the NSA did not collect information on millions of Americans. At a minimum could you concede that Snowden has exposed possibly false testimony and an attempt to mislead elected representatives that are charged to oversee intelligence activities?

The DNI provided testimony before the Senate indicating that the NSA did not collect information on millions of Americans. At a minimum could you concede that Snowden has exposed possibly false testimony and an attempt to mislead elected representatives that are charged to oversee intelligence activities?

although addressed to Hedge, I certainly would concede your statement

Snowden set off a needed transparency bomb at the very least

he will pay for it, he knew that when he did it

I am glad he did it so we can have an open debate about it, and I don't see how he actually harmed anyone by doing so

The fact that vacuuming American phones and internet by this STRATCOM/NSA
program had to be approved in secret by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court (known as FISA), created to provide secret judicial oversight of the
intelligence community actions outside the USA,

indicates that the system of checks and balances installed to prevent abuses
and overreach does not work.

I think systematic and institutional torture proved that a long time ago, but you raise an excellent point.

However, NSA's United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) strictly prohibits the interception or collection of information about "... U.S. persons, entities, corporations or organizations...." without explicit written legal permission from the United States Attorney General when the subject is located abroad, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when within U.S. Borders.

Wikipedia

So, unless the FISC gave orders to tap everybody's electronic communication, the NSA is operating Out Of Bounds.

"The temptation to sacrifice liberty to end suffering often becomes an attack on the reality of the liberty itself. Rebecca West, a prominent novelist and literary critic (and erstwhile mistress of H. G. Wells) said Huxley had “rewritten in terms of our age” Dostoevsky’s famous parable of the Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov—“a symbolic statement that every generation ought to read afresh.”

“The Grand Inquisitor” is a story within the story, a troubled Karamazov brother’s case against both man and God. In his legend, Christ returns to earth in the fifteenth century and raises a child from the dead; this miracle causes a crowd and a commotion. The Grand Inquisitor, the cardinal of Seville, has Christ arrested and, sentencing Him to death, denounces Him for condemning mankind to misery when He could have made for them a paradise on earth. Underpinning his accusation is the problem of evil: how, if God is all-loving and all-powerful, could He allow man the autonomy to sin? Christ’s life and work held out the possibility of redemption, but left man the freedom not only to doubt but to cause unspeakable suffering. Man has not been equal to that responsibility. “For nothing has ever been more insufferable for man and for human society than freedom,” the cardinal tells Christ. “Turmoil, confusion, and unhappiness—these are the present lot of mankind, after you suffered so much for their freedom!” In the Grand Inquisitor’s indictment, he pits Christ’s offer of redemption against the church’s promise of security:

With us everyone will be happy, and they will no longer rebel or destroy each other, as in your freedom, everywhere. Oh, we shall convince them that they will only become free when they resign their freedom to us, and submit to us. Will we be right, do you think, or will we be lying? They themselves will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember to what horrors of slavery and confusion your freedom led them.

The cardinal’s argument reappears in a strikingly similar confrontation in Brave New World. When John the Savage sours on the wonders of the World State, he foments a riot among the Deltas and is brought before Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller for Western Europe. In the thematic climax of the novel, Mond defends his spiritually arid civilization by recalling the terrible history that preceded it. Love, literature, liberty, and even science itself are sacrificed in this most scientific of societies—all to serve the goals of happiness and stability. “Happiness,” Mond says, “is a hard master—particularly other people’s happiness. A much harder master, if one isn’t conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth.” To achieve lasting social happiness, all else must be given up.

Each of these interrogations lays bare the fundamental compromise at the heart of that society. Both interlocutors avow a struggle, many years ago, to give up what is now at stake—faith for the Grand Inquisitor, truth for the World Controller—to “serve” the weak, debased, tormented human race, whose happiness depends upon the satisfaction of material wants and absolute submission to authority. “Only now,” says the cardinal, “has it become possible to think for the first time about human happiness. Man was made a rebel; can rebels be happy? ... No science will give them bread as long as they remain free, but in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet.” “Truth’s a menace,” says Mond, and “science is a public danger.... Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning. Truth and beauty can’t.” Against the ever-greater misery that appears to be the price of personal autonomy, both pose the question: Is man worth his humanity?"

Next time you are in Safeway or Costco or any big chain store they use your signal to see where you run around and what products you stop at or the area to help in their research for better marketing. They know the stuff that does not get the attention they do not resupply.

Base 104 great post not only that but the ones now doing the contracting that scares me.

Of one thing I am certain...we cannot allow personnel that have taken secrecy oaths to make up their own rules about what information can or should be divulged.

Unless, of course, you have a conscious and know right from wrong. It is brave the people who stand up to their task masters and expose their wrong-doings. Especially in the face of grave punishment as a result.

And I've seen stories about when folks take the internal Whistleblower route, the 9/11 Commission Report is full of such stories.

I know some of you might disagree, but frankly, there are things of which you just have no need to know. You might like to know, or wish you knew, but that's just not the way we work, and for the most part, you've all survived quite well not knowing the details.

Reminds me of a point in the film The Pentagon Papers where they guy says [paraphrased] "Most people in the US don't want to know how they got it, they just want to wake up and have it."

But then again, as Werner points out, we Americans are a bit numb in the brain.

I cannot/will NOT speak for Prism or NSA. I will tell you that NSA takes their responsibility under USSID 18 very seriously.

You cannot be serious, USSID 18 prohibits the collection of data on US citizenry, without an explicit court order. Or am I missing something?

There was a case here where they caught a serial burglar by his cellphone GPS. This data is constantly gathered and stored by your provider. I'm not sure how long they store it.

The police got the information just by asking. It even disturbed the police that the info was so easy to get.

Yes and video cameras in laptops can be turned on remotely too.

What code is in the operating system to make it easier for oversight?

When the first high-quality color printers came on the market the Treasury Dept made Xerox and others put a secret serial number in the firmware that create a microscopic 'brand' on any document printed with those printers. Any document could be traced back to the printer from whence it came.

This is a fact.

It was discovered like 10 or 15 years after the fact by a university thesis study, as I recall.

The point?

Who's idea was it to put global positioning software into a personal communicators, again???

Dya think Jobs dreamed that up all by himself?

What do you suppose we charge Nokia and Samsung to sell their phones here? :-)

Joe, you? Are you really having trouble comprehending? Here, I'm putting in bold the important phrase:

NSA's United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) strictly prohibits the interception or collection of information about "... U.S. persons, entities, corporations or organizations...." without explicit written legal permission

Now, isn't this all about the collection of information?

If not, do please tell me what the fuss is about.

And you want me to dig up real-life stories about folks who try to take the internal whistle-blower route, only to see their efforts 86'd (and themselves terminated)? Give me a couple of minutes...

When the first high-quality color printers came on the market the Treasury Dept made Xerox and others put a secret serial number in the firmware that create a microscopic 'brand' on any document printed with those printers. Any document could be traced back to the printer from whence it came.

I wonder if anyone has ever had success using a color printer to make money, literally.

I don't think that the tags were for spying on all citizens, they were to thwart potential counterfeiters. Or maybe Not??!?!?!

Is is true that tasers leave confetti that has a serial number on it or was that just a dumb movie gimmick?

Right now, many high-powered lawyers are making huge amounts of money, tax-payer financed, trying to resolve this very issue. Just how much data does the law allow NSA to collect and where does it draw the line on US citizens?

From what I heard from the talking heads on the radio, it's going to be a bit before they twist the laws to say "Yep, we gave the NSA unspeakable powers to do whatever the f*#k they want."

But you know (and I know you do), that isn't really what our Congress wanted to write into law. And you know it's a fact that the NSA overstepped it's charter when it went to collect untold volumes of data on US citizens. Their very code of conduct clearly outlines the boundary on US citizens.

To twist it any other way is just academic. You want the story to be written a certain way, they got authors by the dozen who will write it up that way. And now, theyhave to write it up that way, their hands are forced. But you know, and I know, it ain't supposed to be that way.

K-man, you might not like the legal permission, but it is indeed there. Your congressperson has email, write them and bitch about changing the law. I can assure you, NOTHING is done without an appropriate warrant.

Sal, are you saying that they have a court order to collect data on all US citizens? There is an order is that broad?

I will need to see in writing where the law says it's OK to collect data on all US citizens. And, like I said above, I was listening to some very well informed speakers on the radio, and they too were waiting for a description of how the law that passed could have been interpreted as such.

So, if anybody has the statute that gives the NSA broad authority to capture data on all citizens, post up and make me look the fool.

FWIW, a guy I know was bootlegging transit passes in Europe using the printer at his job. When someone was caught with a stack of them, the cops read the microscopic serial number in the prints and tracked it back to his employer. He had already left that job, but forget about that future reference...

Bush eventually got warrants and never went on a full nation fishing expedition.

Let's be excruciatingly clear, W's crew didn't give a wit about the Constitution or Bill of Rights - again and again their conduct was both criminal and treasonous and they only had Aschroft/Gonzales/Yoo/republicans in congress cover their asses after the fact when word started to get out about their activities. All the activities being discussed in the media are authorized by and given cover by various Bush-era laws.

And look, after 9/11 it became painfully clear that war can be waged in ways our military can't protect us from. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out 9/11 was nothing compared to a terrorist attack with a small nuke. So that sad day the dead serious question became: how to stop a terrorist nuke attack?

And that remains the question to this day. What's clear now is that some folks came up with at least the idea of an answer: that likely perpetrators of any such attack in today's world are likely to have a digital footprint. Given that threat, in combination with the various authorization and congressional funding, our nation has clearly embarked on a digital 'Manhattan project' in an attempt to prevent such attacks.

And that project doesn't just involve phones and the internet. Our coasts / shipping lanes have rings of radiation detectors and satellite monitoring for ships which might attempt to leave those lanes. Containers leaving ports are scanned. Our subways are monitored for radiation as witnessed a few months back when a subway was halted and nuke-response team flooded in to the tunnels and pin-pointed a passenger undergoing a radiation-involved medical procedure which triggered their alarms. And you can bet your ass all airport luggage is being scanned as well.

But again being clear, Obama hasn't done this, the Bush crew were the architects of this approach, they set all this in motion, gave it cover, and Congress has been funding it all along under the auspices of the intelligence committees. What Obama has done is signed the appropriations that keep it going. And you can bet any president, a Ron Paul even, would have signed those appropriation bills because guess what? No president wants another 9/11 or worse happening on their watch and have anyone say they didn't do enough to try and prevent it.

But make no mistake, the blueprint for this surveillance build out was in-place a decade ago or the data centers we see up and running it today wouldn't exist - those data centers were planned, designed, paid for by W's crew. The continued build out and implementation does not need any more presidential involvement beyond signing appropriation bills and having the Justice department provide some minimal oversight. And that oversight is also minimal by design and by law.

Hey, it's a f*#king brave new world out there and all your digital toys aren't innocent - they don't just enable your next free latte and your porn habit. They vastly and equally enable the expression of malevolent intent and can be used to coordinate a devastating nuclear attack on one of our cities. What's that you say? You want both your privacy and and protection from a terrorist nuke attack? I'd say, ok, and would you like the Easter Bunny with that as well? Because make no mistake about it Bucko, the reason this is happening is because our military is useless against some of the most serious and likely threats against our nation.

And unfortunately, capturing 60% of the datastream 100% of the time or 100% of the datastream 60% of the time just isn't going to cut it relative to even hoping to 'get lucky' in stopping such an attack. It's more of an all or nothing deal and it's taken a decade just to build out part of the ultimate data collection foundation; it will probably take another decade of to get the analysis and auto-monitoring in place. Hell, we only just learned to do it and that took the invention of Google and Facebook and other social enterprises which had to step up to the 'big data' plate.

You can't really have it both ways - social privacy and protection from a terrorist nuke attack - something has to give and the president you elected before this one made the call on how it was going to go and the build out began. The idea that this president has been much more involved than signing the continuing appropriation bills for it is ludicrous. If he came out publicly and told us all about the program and said he was terminating it then republicans would claim he's leaving us defenseless in the same way they've claimed closing Gitmo would.

The framers of the Constitution didn't and couldn't have conceived of your iPhone; our rapidly evolving digital existence and the threats it enables represents a radical, cross-cultural, trans-national realignment of human reality on all fronts and we will all have to adjust and make painful trade offs. In the end, and all digital narcissism aside, the Internet isn't just for you, the front camera on your phone isn't essential, and all this sh#t could kill you without a single Chinese paratrooper dropping in on your front lawn.

And it isn't a problem you can solve by squeezing the government's access to money or cutting it's budget; this is viewed a strategic requirement for our national defense. And its part of an opening, evolving and continuous cyber-warfare where we are way, way behind the friggin' curve compared to China (we taught it to them). Cut the budget and they'll just shift funds to keep the funding levels for this steady as it's again viewed as critical to our national defense and in many very real ways, is.

Look, I'm all for the Constitution, hate the government, don't like paying taxes, but this, this sh#t is part of a new world which has never existed before and is evolving faster than any technology shift in human history. Really hard choices are going to have to be made as there's no going back to your imaginary white, digital-free, nuclear-family world that really didn't exist in the 50's outside of peoples imaginations. What's it gonna be...? Privacy or protection, because you can't have both and that's what this is all about.

Great post healyje but I object to the characterization 'paid for' by W's crew. They didn't pay sh#t.

President Obama is much like his predecessor when it comes to military matters. While I don't expect him to start an idiotic war in another Iraq I wouldn't put it past him either.

But he said in the run up to the first election how he'd roll and he's pretty much done that. No surprises, in other words.

Laying this at the feet of President Bush is somewhat ridiculous. This one is the Corp. Machine at work, the CEO is irrelevant.

Of course President Obama funded the programs. Of course democrats had a major hand in it. Yall saw the votes. Congressional cowards voted yellow because they knew the truth - they would have been punished in the ballot box had they bucked the panic.

Privacy or protection, because you can't have both and that's what this is all about.

Nice writeup healyje. Indeed, the day after 9-11, our Gov't was wrestling with the problem of having an enemy that was not a state (or state sponsored).

Carry your phone, take pictures with it. It does a great job of documenting your life, where you've been and where you're likely to go. That's the new digital age we live in, and you can love it or leave it.

My problem is that the carrot is "you want the evidence to be a mushroom cloud?" Although the stick is, "I see you went to that peace riot. Who did you talk to when you were there. And oh, sorry about the pepper spray stain on your tee shirt..."

Dissident is now a terrorist activity. And they can hold you without charge, indefinitely.

HP printers will give the US access to ones printer if looking for children's porno.

Reagan with Meese when he was Gov of CA used undisclosed places that NSA would collect on political activists. Everyone in Santa Monica that had anything to do with anti war movement finally figured it out since they were not getting any monthly bills. 3-4 months after NSA had to figure a better way to hide their tracks. They did.

That was the old days, now they contract the companies [thousands] that provide the service the Gov needs.

Laying this at the feet of President Bush is somewhat ridiculous. This one is the Corp. Machine at work, the CEO is irrelevant.

Total bullsh#t. Once charted, funded, and underway the CEO is somewhat irrelevant; but all of this was wholly enabled by the laws authorizing it and those laws are and were entirely owned by BushCo. This is again, why giving - or in the case of BushCo, allowing the Executive to take - more power is perilous business. That crew fostered and leveraged a climate of fear in the wake of 9/11 to do a lot of unsavory, explicitly illegal, and outright treasonous things and this is just another one of those 'things' started illegally and given legal cover after the fact - it's how that crew did business and what kept John Yoo employed.

And hey, it was just part of the neocon's big opportunity to restore the fantasy of a god-given right to white male world supremacy so it was a-ok. How's that worked out so far...?

But you know (and I know you do), that isn't really what our Congress wanted to write into law. And you know it's a fact that the NSA overstepped it's charter when it went to collect untold volumes of data on US citizens. Their very code of conduct clearly outlines the boundary on US citizens.

Yeah, well the American people, Congress, and the UN were all both under- and mis-informed about a lot of things by BushCo. Now you can claim Jim Sensenbrenner (R. Wi - Patriot Act 'author') and Congress didn't understand the 'charter' (and that's probably why they picked him to introduce the bill), but you can bet your ass it's all authorized and they are not 'overstepping' their charter.

If anything, they are probably behind-the-curve in implementing their charter. As I said, for things to be already built out to the level they are means that charter was explicitly to embark on a 'Manhattan Project'-like push to build out this capability as a strategic element of the defense of the nation. No 'over-stepping' involved, if anything, they're under-stepping the project goals and explicit intent.

Again, if someone sails a nuke-in-a-container into Long Beach, SF or NY Harbor and sets if off in the port you folks are all going to be asking if we were trying hard enough to stop it. I'd personally say they're trying pretty hard and folks just don't like the reality of what that takes and means.

David baby of Koch Industries' contributions have gone toward achieving legislation one particular defense appropriation. You want to know what it is. Where most of the funding gone to?

Ron I believe you brought up the subject months ago while being on a climb and something to do with a hilo and I responded and you agreed.

2015 FBI will be using the system mostly in the big cities but can still [providing they are interested in you or anyone they want to] can do it anywhere. You or someone overseas CIA takes over.

Maybe Snowden already knows this and believes it is wrong. Think I brought up the subject a while back with the TV show: Person of Interest and what the US will look like in the future[not the story line].

Plus he would know about the plans that we are downsizing our defense to make it more efficient by using more Special Forces units and the Pentagon being used less and the CIA will use rouge contractors like Eric Prince [Blackwater fame] R2 to do the dirty work with low paying a dollar a day mercs from countries in that area ME and using drones made in S. Africa.
All paid by the US taxpayer.

So maybe the more he tells in the following months the more the discussion about why he did it comes to light.

The president has no authority to stop the program without going to Congress, revealing the scope of its existence and goals, and explicitly asking Congress to shut it down. What are the odds any president would do that once one of them puts the wheels in motion? Zip, nada, none.

The political reality is just as you say: Obama couldn't help it and that's because BushCo both designed it all that way and because what exactly do you propose we do to protect the nation from a terrorist nuke attack in its place (no, there isn't an iPhone app for that).

The Supreme Court ruled that police officers can take DNA samples without a warrant from people they arrest for serious crimes without violating the Fourth Amendment attention

Last part June 02 13 PBS Evening news

GWEN IFILL: Not whenever you're stopped. So, if you're pulled over by the side of the road and under suspicion of having done something, they can't swab you at the side of the road; you have to be under arrest, in custody?

MARCIA COYLE: Well, if you are arrested or if you are stopped by police on the road, the police can do a search incident to an arrest, or they can -- if they have probable cause to believe that you have committed a crime, they are usually required to get a warrant. But they also can search if they are concerned that their safety is at risk.

He had no choice but to 'please' republicans on closing Gitmo, republican's made it all but impossible to close both by fear-mongering that our lowly, incapable supermax prisons simply couldn't keep us safe and by enacting laws which attempt to ensure it couldn't be.

Allowing the surveillance program to proceed had nothing to do with 'pleasing' republicans and everything to do with the choice of having to explicitly and publicly exposing it and asking Congress to shut it down with no clear alternative to present for our national defense.

So 'pleasing'? Please...

And again, what do you folks propose we do instead to try and prevent a terrorist nuke attack which is a million times more likely than a Chinese paratrooper landing in LA?

"He had no choice but to 'please' republicans on closing Gitmo, republican's made it all but impossible to close both by fear-mongering that our lowly, incapable supermax prisons simply couldn't keep us safe and by enacting laws which attempt to ensure it couldn't be."

Obama is Commander in Chief. He can simply order all Guantanamo military personel be transfered elsewhere. Gitmo wouldn't run itself without staff. Obama can do this anytime he wants.

What do you folks propose we do instead to try and prevent a terrorist nuke attack ...

Obviously a tough, but valid, question. Personally, I'm of the notion that a bully is hated by more folks on the playground than he is adored.

Imagine the cost of the Afghan war. The untold destruction, civilian lives lost, and emotional scars left on the country. Take the same money spent on bombs, and pour that into the infrastructure of the country. Schools for girls and women, upgraded agriculture infrastructure, etc, etc. Beleive it or not, trillion$ can actually still buy things these days, especially in third-world countries.

Now this might not rid us of the threat of Afghan Taliban. But I'll tell ya, the folks that gained by those schools and infrastructure would sure be on our side. And that goes a long way in the Afghan countryside.

Can you imagine the difference in the world if we did the same to Iraq, instead of bombing it back to the stone age?

I know, I'm high. But we'd better soon realize that any war on this planet is a civil war, and as michael so nicely pointed out above, there's bigger fish to fry than silly wars between ego-filled hawks.

Terrorists with bombs? They are sponsored by states who want to war with us, more than likely due to our ongoing foreign policy of imperialism.

Obama is Commander in Chief. He can simply order all Guantanamo military personel be transfered elsewhere. Gitmo wouldn't run itself without staff. Obama can do this anytime he wants.

wrong

President Obama soon after inauguration signed an Executive Order to close GITMO, as he said he would do.

Congress refused to allow it to be closed.

If you recall, maybe not, there was a big debate in the Senate about where exactly to transfer the GITMO detainees. The Republicans were screaming those guys were SUCH a threat that they could not be held safely in non-military run prisons.

But really, what exactly do YOU care so much about those guys in GITMO anyway?

President Obama, for a fact, authorized and continued this program. Ergo, Bush II.

How, in fact, has Obama authorized this program? He has only "continued" the program by signing continuing appropriate bills for it.

And yet again, your alternative for defense against terrorist attacks? And as I've been saying it's simply one leg of a national defense strategy aimed at stopping terrorist attacks.

The basic problem here is that the program was shrouded in secrecy from the beginning - again, by BushCo, just like rendition, torture, and parallel sham 'intelligence' [manufacturing] organizations, etc. The programs should have been upfront and public explaining the national security goals, but then that would have also required acknowledging that our military - with it's uber-bloated budget, can't really protect use from the most viable threats.

In ten years time you're cell phones may monitor and automatically report radiation, earthquakes, chemical leaks, auto crashes and gunshots in urban areas. Welcome to the digital world.

Dingus, I know you're a real middle-of-the-roader, everyone-is-to-blame, enough-fault-to-go-around sort of guy, but this is BushCo's baby lock-stock-and-barrel and say what you will, there wouldn't be a gleaming surveillance palace in Utah up and running if it weren't.

Given the very real threat, the only open question relative to Obama is what could he reasonably be or have been expected to do about it other than sign the continuing budget resolutions? I suspect you'd have quietly done exactly the same thing.

let us be correct in that Obama not only approved the newly redrafted patriot act, but added greatly to it in language and scope.

A completely and utterly false claim. Obama signed the 'PATRIOT Sunsets Extension Act of 2011' which extends three existing provisions of the Patriot Act for four years: roving wiretaps, searches of business records, and conducting surveillance of "lone wolves". All three provisions were extended, but with new restrictions and congressional oversight placed on those powers.

So in fact, the truth is entirely the opposite of your claim.

The Gov. printing money to cover bad mortgage debt...

As opposed to the Gov. printing money to cover not one, but two, unnecessary pre-emptive wars...

Why aren't the Republicans screaming for hell or you do not hear anything from McSain. Would it be anything to do with funds from the Koch brothers in the last election that they wasted by trying to defeat our current Pres.

And the answer to is the Koch brothers who have funded and is heavily invested in Facial Recognition Technology software and everthing that includes for making a good shot: skin tone, eyes, ears, nose, teeth and making sure new photos on getting your current or new auto license: no smiles.

So support Congress Corp. What can we do without them.

So color your hair a different color until they find out and need to upgrade their software.

Coz, that's true. I read an article about how home buyers are now competing against the banks to buy homes. And this is how I predicted it--the housing crisis would cause untold foreclosures, and then the banks [or the elite] can swoop in to buy up the real estate for a fraction of what was previously on the books.

Buying with cash? You can bet that ain't the "middle class" doing the buying.

But it's true, the stock market has hit all-time highs. What percentage of US folk have a rich portfolio nowa-days, when the top 0.1% earn half of all capital gains?

Dingus, I know you're a real middle-of-the-roader, everyone-is-to-blame, enough-fault-to-go-around sort of guy, but this is BushCo's baby lock-stock-and-barrel and say what you will, there wouldn't be a gleaming surveillance palace in Utah up and running if it weren't.

here you say its bushco's fault. while bush certainly started it, when will obama take the responsibility for anything?

Given the very real threat, the only open question relative to Obama is what could he reasonably be or have been expected to do about it other than sign the continuing budget resolutions? I suspect you'd have quietly done exactly the same thing.

here you justify why obama had to keep it going, you argue that its the best decision.

so WTF is it? is it that obama actually decided it is alright (hell he justified it on tv), or is it still bushco's fault.

some people are so f*#king flawed in their logic that it blows my mind. you are as deluded as any hard core teabagger...f*#king amazing.

pull your head out of your ass. i said that healyje by his own post blames bush.......then turns around and says that the NSA is doing the right thing anyway

I'm not saying "the NSA is doing the right thing", what I am saying is the threat of a terrorist nuke attack on one of our major ports is a very real and present threat. I am saying that this evolving digital world is highly complex. I am saying BushCo made the call that this was going to be our response and a major pillar of our national defense going forward. I am saying Obama has had zero power to stop it other than by refusing to sign the intelligence appropriation bills and telling the American people that he's simply stopping it with no viable alternative strategy to deal with the threat. If he did that you would be all on his case for leaving America defenseless.

Crikey, you clowns are always up in arms about 'border security' - this is all about 'securing the [digital] borders' or are you really that dense?

Again, Obama didn't authorize these programs, but neither he nor any other president is going to de-fund them without having some remote inkling of what we would do instead. Again, what are you suggesting is the alternative? Blind faith? A wink and a nod?

WASHINGTON (AP) — Dogged by fear and confusion about sweeping spy programs, intelligence officials sought to convince House lawmakers in an unusual briefing Tuesday that the government's years-long collection of phone records and Internet usage is necessary for protecting Americans — and does not trample on their privacy rights.

But the country's main civil liberties organization wasn't buying it, filing the most significant lawsuit against the massive phone record collection program so far. The American Civil Liberties Union and its New York chapter sued the federal government Tuesday in New York, asking a court to demand that the Obama administration end the program and purge the records it has collected.

The ACLU is claiming standing as a customer of Verizon, which was identified last week as the phone company the government had ordered to turn over daily records of calls made by all its customers.

The parade of FBI and intelligence officials who briefed the entire House on Tuesday was the latest attempt to soothe outrage over National Security Agency programs which collect billions of Americans' phone and Internet records. Since they were revealed last week, the programs have spurred distrust in the Obama administration from across the globe.

Several key lawmakers, including House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, refocused the furor Tuesday on the elusive 29-year-old former intelligence contractor who is claiming responsibility for revealing the surveillance programs to two newspapers. Boehner joined others in calling Edward Snowden a "traitor."

But attempts to defend the NSA systems by a leading Republican senator who supports them highlighted how confusingly intricate the programs are — even to the lawmakers who follow the issue closely.

Explaining the programs to reporters, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a member of the Senate Armed Services and Judiciary committees, initially described how the NSA uses pattern analysis of millions of phone calls from the United States, even if those numbers have no known connection to terrorism. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has vigorously maintained that there are strict limits on the programs to prevent intruding on Americans' privacy, and senior officials quickly denied Graham's description.

Graham later said he misspoke and that Clapper was right: The phone records are only accessed if there is a known connection to terrorism.

House lawmakers had more questions and, in many cases, more concerns about the level of surveillance by U.S. intelligence agencies Tuesday after FBI, Justice and other intelligence officials briefed them on the two NSA programs.

"Really it's a debate between public safety, how far we go with public safety and protecting us from terrorist attacks versus how far we go on the other side," said Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. "Congress needs to debate this issue."

He said his panel and the Judiciary Committee would examine what has happened and see whether there are recommendations for the future.

Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., like many members, said he was unaware of the scope of the data collection.

"I did not know 1 billion records a day were coming under the control of the federal executive branch," Sherman said.

Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., said there was a lot of heated discussion and that, "Congress didn't feel like they were informed."

Cohen conceded many lawmakers had failed to attend classified briefings in previous years where they could have learned more. "I think Congress has really found itself a little bit asleep at the wheel," he said.

One of the Senate's staunchest critics of the surveillance programs put Clapper in the crosshairs, accusing him of not being truthful in March when he asked during a Senate hearing whether the NSA collects any data on millions of Americans. Clapper said it did not. Officials generally do not discuss classified information in public settings, reserving discussion on top-secret programs for closed sessions with lawmakers where they will not be revealed to adversaries.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said he had been dissatisfied with the NSA's answers to his questions and had given Clapper a day's advance notice prior to the hearing to prepare an answer. Not fully believing Clapper's public denial of the program, Wyden said he asked Clapper privately afterward whether he wanted to stick with a firm 'no' to the question.

On Tuesday, Wyden revealed his efforts to get Clapper to tell him about the program and called for hearings to discuss the programs. He was also among a group of senators who introduced legislation to force the government to declassify opinions of a secret court that authorizes the surveillance.

"The American people have the right to expect straight answers from the intelligence leadership to the questions asked by their representatives," Wyden said.

Clapper's spokesman did not comment on Wyden's statement. But in an interview with NBC News earlier this week, Clapper said he "responded in what I thought was the most truthful or least most untruthful manner, by saying, 'No,'" because the program was classified.

The Senate Intelligence Committee will be briefed on the programs again Thursday.

Congressional leaders and intelligence committee members have been routinely briefed about the spy programs, officials said, and Capitol Hill has at least twice renewed laws approving them. But the disclosure of their sheer scope stunned some lawmakers, shocked foreign allies from nations with strict privacy protections and emboldened civil liberties advocates who long have accused the government of being too invasive in the name of national security.

On the heels of new polls showing a majority of Americans support some aspects of the spy programs, lawmakers defended the daily surveillance of billions of phone and Internet records that they said have helped make the U.S. safer in the years after the 9/11 attacks. A poll by The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center conducted over the weekend found Americans generally prioritize the government's need to investigate terrorist threats over the need to protect personal privacy.

But a CBS News poll conducted June 9-10 showed that while most approve of government collection of phone records of Americans suspected of terrorist activity and Internet activities of foreigners, a majority disapproved of federal agencies collecting the phone records of ordinary Americans. Thirty percent agreed with the government's assessment that the revelation of the programs would hurt the U.S.' ability to prevent future terrorist attacks, while 57 percent said it would have no impact.

Instead, ire focused on Snowden, the CIA employee-turned-NSA contractor who admitted in an online interview that he exposed the programs in an attempt to safeguard American privacy rights from government snooping.

"He's a traitor," Boehner said on ABC's "Good Morning America."

"The disclosure of this information puts Americans at risk," Boehner said. "It shows our adversaries what our capabilities are. And it's a giant violation of the law."

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., also chimed in Monday, calling the disclosure "an act of treason," and that Snowden should be prosecuted.

Only one American — fugitive al-Qaida propaganda chief Adam Gadahn — has been charged with treason since the World War II era. A law enforcement official said prosecutors were building a case against Snowden on Tuesday and had not decided what charges would be brought against him.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because there is no final decision on the charges. But it's unlikely that Snowden would be charged with treason, which carries the death penalty as a punishment, and therefore could complicate extradition from foreign countries.

"The 54 words of the Fourth Amendment are remarkably clear: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Seem pretty clear to me. The constitution has be shat on by Bush and Obama both

hey, here is a freaky thing that happened to me just a couple months ago. i listen to a lot of youtube music vids. one evening i had either just clicked on some vid, or was trying to get the lyrics to a vid/song and my computor totally froze up. this notice appeared and locked the computor onto it. it said it was from the FBI and that they were fining me for downloading unauthorized music or something or other. they wanted $250 wihtin so many hours. i figured it was some sort of virus/scam as soon as i saw that. i crashed my computer and reloaded it. anyway, i found out it was just that (a scam). the "freaky" thing about it, though, was that they had taken my picture (through my own webcam which i never use). and posted it with the notice. it was taken just seconds before my computer locked up. my point is, if they can do that, what could the real fbi do? yikes!!!

Dingus, I know you're a real middle-of-the-roader, everyone-is-to-blame, enough-fault-to-go-around sort of guy, but this is BushCo's baby lock-stock-and-barrel and say what you will, there wouldn't be a gleaming surveillance palace in Utah up and running if it weren't.

A. I think the current state of partisanship of politics is poisonous. President Bush bad, President Obama good - naive. In many ways they are indistinguishable, and this topic is certainly one of them. Big brother is big brother regardless of party affiliation. Fascists can come from either extreme of the political spectrum.

B. I do not believe for a second about the 'no BushCo, no NSA cell phone spying'. Not for a second. Would the Al Gore administration or the Kerry administration have agreed to build it? YES.

“People who think I made a mistake in picking Hong Kong as a location misunderstand my intentions,” he told the newspaper, The South China Morning Post. “I am not here to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality.”

Translation: "Oh crap, me and my sorry-assed high school education didn't do a great job in planning my next move. Well I don't want to admit I did a boneheaded move by coming to HK, I'll just try to play it cool . . ."

The daily newspaper spew about the Chinese hacking our poor inept military is merely part of a propaganda campaign designed to prop up failing military budgets in the big wind down from a decade of war.

For every Chinese hack you can bet your ass there's a US hack. This sh#t goes both ways.

Hmmm, didn't President Obama meet with Chinese premier in Palm Springs last week? How convenient this revelation of NSA spying on American citizens, huh? I wonder if NSA will outsource? I bet the Chinese can do it cheaper!

A. I think the current state of partisanship of politics is poisonous. President Bush bad, President Obama good - naive. In many ways they are indistinguishable, and this topic is certainly one of them. Big brother is big brother regardless of party affiliation. Fascists can come from either extreme of the political spectrum.

Again, complete claptrap and if you're now subscribing to Jonah Goldberg's obscene nonsense I'm somewhat at a loss for words.

B. I do not believe for a second about the 'no BushCo, no NSA cell phone spying'. Not for a second. Would the Al Gore administration or the Kerry administration have agreed to build it? YES.

I didn't say, 'no BushCo, no NSA cell phone spying'; I did say that in the wake of 9/11, and understanding it could have been much worse, BushCo made a call to put a 'Manhattan Project'-scale digital communications surveillance and radiation monitoring program into place. What we're debating today is exactly that.

Would Gore or Kerry have built it? Gore no, Kerry probably yes. Gore certainly would have had a much more public exploration of the issue and any implementation.

Coz, my nuke terrorist scenario is simply the most realistic and likely way anyone is going to make a nuke attack against us in the future. We, the Russians, Europeans, China, India and Pakistan built hundreds of container-capable artillery nukes not to mention 'suitcase' and mortar nukes.

H-912 transport container for Mk-54 SADM.

Credit: healyje

"Davy Crockett" version

Credit: healyje

And my speculation on that front is entirely validated by the occasional news stories about cargo vessel interdictions, the recent Chicago TSA VIPR team stopping a Metro train (not subway) after a radiation alert, the development of radiation monitoring bouys, and monitoring container straddle carriers.

Not to mention DHS publicly-stated goals of 100% container ship / container inspection coverage and cargo airlines public resistance to 100% coverage of air cargo tells you DHS is in a full-court monitoring press that is the radiation monitoring element of a strategic program of which Prism likely represents the comm element of.

Would Gore or Kerry have built it? Gore no, Kerry probably yes. Gore certainly would have had a much more public exploration of the issue and any implementation.

Actually I agree with this. Gore would not have started a war in Iraq nor Afghanistan. He truly IS different than the Company Men. Oh well, one thing we can probably agree on is BushCo DID steal the election, out and out stole it.

Traffic analysis is the process of intercepting and examining messages in order to deduce information from patterns in communication. It can be performed even when the messages are encrypted and cannot be decrypted. In general, the greater the number of messages observed, or even intercepted and stored, the more can be inferred from the traffic. Traffic analysis can be performed in the context of military intelligence or counter-intelligence, and is a concern in computer security.

Joe says we need this NSA surveillance since we now live in a different world of terrorism. Bush got away with a lot using emergency war powers as an excuse. Now that we are not at war, that excuse is not constitutional.

A man-portable nuke can't just sit on a shelf for a period of time, and then be expected to go "bang" when the pin's pulled. If they're going to work, they require frequent and complicated maintanence, beyond the capacity of most governments - let alone a bunch of illiterate, Koran thumping cavemen.

The Justice Department and the DNI promised a new effort to declassify opinions issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court; Justice official Lisa Monaco, now Obama’s counterterrorism director, said all significant FISA rulings would be reviewed for declassification. But no new opinions were declassified under the initiative.

The House last year turned back attempts to require public reports on the general outlines of the government’s surveillance programs. The various disclosure proposals, offered by Democratic Reps. Bobby Scott (Va.), Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.) and Sheila Jackson Lee (Tex.), were defeated by the Judiciary Committee.

In the Senate, amendments to provide modest disclosures and declassifications, offered by Wyden and fellow Democratic Sens. Jeff Merkley (Ore.) and Mark Udall (Colo.) during the FISA renewal in December, were all defeated.

The FISA court itself colluded in the secrecy. After senators asked the court to provide declassified summaries of its decisions, the chief FISA judge, Reggie B. Walton, responded with a letter on March 27 citing “serious obstacles” to the request.

“It was a shoddy performance all around,” Aftergood said Monday. “The pervasive secrecy on this topic created an information vacuum. If congressional oversight was not going to fill it in, it turned out leaks would. That’s not the optimal solution.”

----

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper [ director of national intelligence ] at a Senate hearing in March, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

“No, sir,” Clapper testified.

“It does not?” Wyden pressed.

“Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.”

We now know that Clapper was not telling the truth. The National Security Agency is quite wittingly collecting phone records of millions of Americans, and much more.

Don't need a lecture on traffic analysis, I've been following its successes since the beginning and it's impressively effective.

There's no problem with using it for international communications as far as I'm concerned.

But here's the big rub when used domestically;

No government has ever refrained from abusing the power that it has been granted! That's what the Constitution is there to prevent. It's a limiting, not an empowering document, a characteristic that Obama has publicly complained about on several occasions.

What's to stop the administrative state from using it to say analyze the campaign traffic of the other party or grass roots political movements.

What if say Johnson had had it to crush the anti war movement, or a J. Edgar to pull the strings of every politician he encountered. (he did a good enough job without it)Or Clinton to punish the anti abortion movement.

There's a reason the fourth amendment is there and if we throw away our political freedom, the muzzies have won.

Here's a conjecture about one use the metadata will be put to. It includes the source and destination phone of each call. A truly enormous, 300 million by 300 million node matrix will be constructed. If phone i sends to phone j then node (i,j) will be set to 1, otherwise 0. These are sometimes called connectivity or topology matrices. There are many theorems and algorithms associated with these. Djikstra has an algorithm for determing the shortest path between any two nodes.

This matrix will clearly be mostly zeros. There may be theories as to what a terrorist subnetwork will look like within this giant matrix.

Dont't infer from this that I support this data harvesting. I am strongly opposed.

You have to connect a helluva lot of dots between a database with everyone's phone records and nuke being smuggled into the country.

You don't have to connect hardly any dots at all once you come to the conclusion whomever might attempt such an attack will likely have a digital footprint - and clearly BushCo came to that exact conclusion - and are building out for 100% coverage of domestic and US-foreign calls. Now that's not my (or Marine Corps Lt. General Paul K. Van Riper's) conclusion, but it was BuchCo's or we wouldn't be arguing the point now.

[ Jonah Goldberg is 'intellectual jujitsu' author of one of the new right's pillars of modern conservative 'thought': Liberal Fascism (his mother is Lucianne Goldberg, who 'advised' Linda Trip in the Lewinsky scandal) ]

I have no doubt at all that, should they be asked (and I'm sure they will be), SCOTUS justices will rule it's entirely legal to harvest call metadata under the Patriot Act's business records provision. That's why it was written the way that it was - transcripts of your calls? No. Telco metadata records (their business records) about your calls? Sure, no problem under the business records provision.

I understand it 'feels' wrong, illegal, and unconstitutional, but I very highly doubt that what with John Yoo having been involved with crafting it and especially since half the intent of the damn bill was to provide legal cover for this surveillance (I consider Yoo to be a real Mengele of the legal profession):

Frontline: And gathering intelligence then means gathering intelligence at home as well as abroad.

Yoo: I think that's right. Again, if you're going to gather intelligence and follow members of Al Qaeda outside the United States, you don't want to make the United States some kind of safe haven where once they cross the borders into our country it actually becomes harder to find them and track them down. That would be perverse; exactly the reverse kind of powers that you want our government to have when it's fighting especially this kind of enemy, which tries to infiltrate our borders and launch surprise attacks.

Deep within the National Security Agency, an elite, rarely discussed team of hackers and spies is targeting America's enemies abroad.

BY MATTHEW M. AID | JUNE 10, 2013

This weekend, U.S. President Barack Obama sat down for a series of meetings with China's newly appointed leader, Xi Jinping. We know that the two leaders spoke at length about the topic du jour -- cyber-espionage -- a subject that has long frustrated officials in Washington and is now front and center with the revelations of sweeping U.S. data mining. The media has focused at length on China's aggressive attempts to electronically steal U.S. military and commercial secrets, but Xi pushed back at the "shirt-sleeves" summit, noting that China, too, was the recipient of cyber-espionage. But what Obama probably neglected to mention is that he has his own hacker army, and it has burrowed its way deep, deep into China's networks.

When the agenda for the meeting at the Sunnylands estate outside Palm Springs, California, was agreed to several months ago, both parties agreed that it would be a nice opportunity for President Xi, who assumed his post in March, to discuss a wide range of security and economic issues of concern to both countries. According to diplomatic sources, the issue of cybersecurity was not one of the key topics to be discussed at the summit. Sino-American economic relations, climate change, and the growing threat posed by North Korea were supposed to dominate the discussions.
Then, two weeks ago, White House officials leaked to the press that Obama intended to raise privately with Xi the highly contentious issue of China's widespread use of computer hacking to steal U.S. government, military, and commercial secrets. According to a Chinese diplomat in Washington who spoke in confidence, Beijing was furious about the sudden elevation of cybersecurity and Chinese espionage on the meeting's agenda. According to a diplomatic source in Washington, the Chinese government was even angrier that the White House leaked the new agenda item to the press before Washington bothered to tell Beijing about it.

So the Chinese began to hit back. Senior Chinese officials have publicly accused the U.S. government of hypocrisy and have alleged that Washington is also actively engaged in cyber-espionage. When the latest allegation of Chinese cyber-espionage was leveled in late May in a front-page Washington Post article, which alleged that hackers employed by the Chinese military had stolen the blueprints of over three dozen American weapons systems, the Chinese government's top Internet official, Huang Chengqing, shot back that Beijing possessed "mountains of data" showing that the United States has engaged in widespread hacking designed to steal Chinese government secrets. This weekend's revelations about the National Security Agency's PRISM and Verizon metadata collection from a 29-year-old former CIA undercover operative named Edward J. Snowden, who is now living in Hong Kong, only add fuel to Beijing's position.

But Washington never publicly responded to Huang's allegation, and nobody in the U.S. media seems to have bothered to ask the White House if there is a modicum of truth to the Chinese charges.

It turns out that the Chinese government's allegations are essentially correct. According to a number of confidential sources, a highly secretive unit of the National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. government's huge electronic eavesdropping organization, called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, has successfully penetrated Chinese computer and telecommunications systems for almost 15 years, generating some of the best and most reliable intelligence information about what is going on inside the People's Republic of China.

Hidden away inside the massive NSA headquarters complex at Fort Meade, Maryland, in a large suite of offices segregated from the rest of the agency, TAO is a mystery to many NSA employees. Relatively few NSA officials have complete access to information about TAO because of the extraordinary sensitivity of its operations, and it requires a special security clearance to gain access to the unit's work spaces inside the NSA operations complex. The door leading to its ultramodern operations center is protected by armed guards, an imposing steel door that can only be entered by entering the correct six-digit code into a keypad, and a retinal scanner to ensure that only those individuals specially cleared for access get through the door.

According to former NSA officials interviewed for this article, TAO's mission is simple. It collects intelligence information on foreign targets by surreptitiously hacking into their computers and telecommunications systems, cracking passwords, compromising the computer security systems protecting the targeted computer, stealing the data stored on computer hard drives, and then copying all the messages and data traffic passing within the targeted email and text-messaging systems. The technical term of art used by NSA to describe these operations is computer network exploitation (CNE).

TAO is also responsible for developing the information that would allow the United States to destroy or damage foreign computer and telecommunications systems with a cyberattack if so directed by the president. The organization responsible for conducting such a cyberattack is U.S. Cyber Command (Cybercom), whose headquarters is located at Fort Meade and whose chief is the director of the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander.

Commanded since April of this year by Robert Joyce, who formerly was the deputy director of the NSA's Information Assurance Directorate (responsible for protecting the U.S. government's communications and computer systems), TAO, sources say, is now the largest and arguably the most important component of the NSA's huge Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) Directorate, consisting of over 1,000 military and civilian computer hackers, intelligence analysts, targeting specialists, computer hardware and software designers, and electrical engineers.

The sanctum sanctorum of TAO is its ultramodern operations center at Fort Meade called the Remote Operations Center (ROC), which is where the unit's 600 or so military and civilian computer hackers (they themselves CNE operators) work in rotating shifts 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
These operators spend their days (or nights) searching the ether for computers systems and supporting telecommunications networks being utilized by, for example, foreign terrorists to pass messages to their members or sympathizers. Once these computers have been identified and located, the computer hackers working in the ROC break into the targeted computer systems electronically using special software designed by TAO's own corps of software designers and engineers specifically for this purpose, download the contents of the computers' hard drives, and place software implants or other devices called "buggies" inside the computers' operating systems, which allows TAO intercept operators at Fort Meade to continuously monitor the email and/or text-messaging traffic coming in and out of the computers or hand-held devices.

TAO's work would not be possible without the team of gifted computer scientists and software engineers belonging to the Data Network Technologies Branch, who develop the sophisticated computer software that allows the unit's operators to perform their intelligence collection mission. A separate unit within TAO called the Telecommunications Network Technologies Branch (TNT) develops the techniques that allow TAO's hackers to covertly gain access to targeted computer systems and telecommunications networks without being detected. Meanwhile, TAO's Mission Infrastructure Technologies Branch develops and builds the sensitive computer and telecommunications monitoring hardware and support infrastructure that keeps the effort up and running.

TAO even has its own small clandestine intelligence-gathering unit called the Access Technologies Operations Branch, which includes personnel seconded by the CIA and the FBI, who perform what are described as "off-net operations," which is a polite way of saying that they arrange for CIA agents to surreptitiously plant eavesdropping devices on computers and/or telecommunications systems overseas so that TAO's hackers can remotely access them from Fort Meade.

It is important to note that TAO is not supposed to work against domestic targets in the United States or its possessions. This is the responsibility of the FBI, which is the sole U.S. intelligence agency chartered for domestic telecommunications surveillance. But in light of information about wider NSA snooping, one has to prudently be concerned about whether TAO is able to perform its mission of collecting foreign intelligence without accessing communications originating in or transiting through the United States.

Since its creation in 1997, TAO has garnered a reputation for producing some of the best intelligence available to the U.S. intelligence community not only about China, but also on foreign terrorist groups, espionage activities being conducted against the United States by foreign governments, ballistic missile and weapons of mass destruction developments around the globe, and the latest political, military, and economic developments around the globe.

According to a former NSA official, by 2007 TAO's 600 intercept operators were secretly tapping into thousands of foreign computer systems and accessing password-protected computer hard drives and emails of targets around the world. As detailed in my 2009 history of NSA, The Secret Sentry, this highly classified intercept program, known at the time as Stumpcursor, proved to be critically important during the U.S. Army's 2007 "surge" in Iraq, where it was credited with single-handedly identifying and locating over 100 Iraqi and al Qaeda insurgent cells in and around Baghdad. That same year, sources report that TAO was given an award for producing particularly important intelligence information about whether Iran was trying to build an atomic bomb.

By the time Obama became president of the United States in January 2009, TAO had become something akin to the wunderkind of the U.S. intelligence community. "It's become an industry unto itself," a former NSA official said of TAO at the time. "They go places and get things that nobody else in the IC [intelligence community] can."

Given the nature and extraordinary political sensitivity of its work, it will come as no surprise that TAO has always been, and remains, extraordinarily publicity shy. Everything about TAO is classified top secret codeword, even within the hypersecretive NSA. Its name has appeared in print only a few times over the past decade, and the handful of reporters who have dared inquire about it have been politely but very firmly warned by senior U.S. intelligence officials not to describe its work for fear that it might compromise its ongoing efforts. According to a senior U.S. defense official who is familiar with TAO's work, "The agency believes that the less people know about them [TAO] the better."

The word among NSA officials is that if you want to get promoted or recognized, get a transfer to TAO as soon as you can. The current head of the NSA's SIGINT Directorate, Teresa Shea, 54, got her current job in large part because of the work she did as chief of TAO in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when the unit earned plaudits for its ability to collect extremely hard-to-come-by information during the latter part of George W. Bush's administration. We do not know what the information was, but sources suggest that it must have been pretty important to propel Shea to her position today. But according to a recently retired NSA official, TAO "is the place to be right now."

There's no question that TAO has continued to grow in size and importance since Obama took office in 2009, which is indicative of its outsized role. In recent years, TAO's collection operations have expanded from Fort Meade to some of the agency's most important listening posts in the United States. There are now mini-TAO units operating at the huge NSA SIGINT intercept and processing centers at NSA Hawaii at Wahiawa on the island of Oahu; NSA Georgia at Fort Gordon, Georgia; and NSA Texas at the Medina Annex outside San Antonio, Texas; and within the huge NSA listening post at Buckley Air Force Base outside Denver.

The problem is that TAO has become so large and produces so much valuable intelligence information that it has become virtually impossible to hide it anymore. The Chinese government is certainly aware of TAO's activities. The "mountains of data" statement by China's top Internet official, Huang Chengqing, is clearly an implied threat by Beijing to release this data. Thus it is unlikely that President Obama pressed President Xi too hard at the Sunnydale summit on the question of China's cyber-espionage activities. As any high-stakes poker player knows, you can only press your luck so far when the guy on the other side of the table knows what cards you have in your hand.

Are you Ungoogleable? It is the newest cool.
Found the below from an unknown blogger with rather scary sop.

I'll let you all in on a little secret that makes defeating Google
(and everyone else) easy.

Lie.

To everyone.

The phone company, the utility company, your landlord, the bank,
everyone. Do it consistently. Give each one of these data tracking
nitwits a different name, address, contact phone (none of them need be
real, except perhaps for the bank, if you use one, have that mail sent to
you out of state). Make ups SSN for those the "demand" it. Pay your
deposits and forget about it. Lie to the DMV about where you live when
you get your license (if you bother with one, I don't). Same goes with
your insurance company. I don't plan on filing a claim anyway - why
should I? So I can pay a higher premium? (yes, I have insurance, it's
to protect the other guy, not me).

Lie to your neighbors (you may need to move). Lie to your "friends". If
they're really your friends, they won't care what your real name is
anyway.
\

Unpublished phone number? That only puts your name on a list. If you
don't want hassling phone calls, don't give out your phone number. Lie
when forced to reveal what is not in your best interest.

Lying needs to become a part of your defense. Your government lies to you
constantly, about everything. We are under no moral or ethical
obligations to cooperate with them on any level.

Why in the world should anyone trust what Verizon or Facebook or Google says? As if these major players in the corporate state hold their consumers' privacy as sacrosanct ... they value their market share, profits, and crisis management. If these corporations are to be trusted why didn't they voluntarily and explicitly disclose this info to their customers long ago and/or once confronted with the government's demands for the data immediately cease or suspend all operations instead of betraying their customers' privacy?

Furthermore, I recall years back when it was understood that the USA government was adopting highly invasive investigating tactics on individuals suspected of 'terrorism’ under the Patriot Act, the organizations and individuals who were approached to provide information or testimony were compelled under threat of law to total secrecy regarding the investigation and information gathering.

The legal commentary I've read about the extradition policy regarding Beijing and Mainland China is that it entails a grey zone, which plays well for Snowden.

Why in the world should anyone trust what Verizon or Facebook or Google says?

Those pieces of paper don't say sh#t. Now the folks who run those companies?

They're part of an NSA spyring dedicated to spying on Americans. Let them quibble as to HOW MUCH spying they did, but spies they are. I mean, that's what Google is, its what that company does... quibble as to commercial vs. government, the apparatus of google is built to spy on people, simple as that, built from the ground up for that specific purpose, to sell the data. So they sold some to the government - this is a surprise?

And the whole worlds knows, especially George Smiley's People, you can never trust a spy. Ever. Spies don't trust spies, why would you?

The United States is not at war, not constitutionally. Congress declined to exercise its duty in the matter.

DMT

Exactly, this "We are at war forever" BS is just an excuse to expand power and do whatever they want.

And it turns out Google IS evil. If you have Chrome or some google software on your computer, and try to block it from sending out information on you, the little app keeps reinstalling it in other places on your computer to get around the restrictions, just like malware. They suck.

If Snowden is a whistleblower trying to protect innocent Americans, why is he also telling everyone that the US is spying on China? Is that to protect Americans? Can someone explain how using your security clearance to reveal our government's (alleged) spying activities against another country (a country which clearly hacks into our computers on a daily basis) is protecting innocent Americans? Can it really be argued that it is coincidence that he reveals this information about China while he is hiding in Hong Kong and asking the Chinese and Hong Kong governments to NOT extradite him. Is this really any different than outright treason by someone who gives classified information to a foreign country and then asks that country for protection? What would people say if Snowden also told Iran about the spying we are doing on them, and then bought a one-way ticket to Tehran? Would people still be calling him a hero?

"For an American, the traditional home for the kind of story Snowden was planning to reveal would have been the New York Times. But during extensive interviews last week with a Guardian team, he recalled how dismayed he had been to discover the Times had a great scoop in election year 2004 – that the Bush administration, post 9/11, allowed the NSA to snoop on US citizens without warrants – but had sat on it for a year before publishing.

Snowden said this was a turning point for him, confirming his belief that traditional media outlets could not be trusted. He looked around for alternative journalists, those who were both anti-establishment and at home with blogging and other social media. The member of this generation that he most trusted was the Guardian commentator Glenn Greenwald. "

"In what were to be the last words of the interview, he (Snowden) quoted Benjamin Franklin: "Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.""

In fact he sold that stolen intel to China........BUT you DONT give our secrets away to the opposite side.

Ron, I'm curious about why you think Snowden gave away secrets to China? I haven't seen anything in the press stating that. Sure he's saying the US has been hacking China, but that's not exactly a secret.

Have been watching some interesting video interviews with former NSA technical director, William Binney. He was with the NSA for 36 years and resigned in 2001, when he decided the level of NSA monitoring within the USA was breaking the constitution. He also complained of billions of dollars (of our money) being spent on system after system, with little oversight.

Do you have access to an industrial-strength drum of BS neutralizer? This thread needs it badly.

Now this couldn't be more spot on...

Joe says we need this NSA surveillance since we now live in a different world of terrorism. Bush got away with a lot using emergency war powers as an excuse. Now that we are not at war, that excuse is not constitutional.

No, I didn't say that. I said if you believe a terrorist nuke attack is likely to have a digital footprint then it's pretty hard to argue against the strategic radiation and communications monitoring decision taken by BushCo for our national defense going forward. Certainly not without proffering a viable alternative or justifying why none is required.

But as I keep saying, it is a different world and our digital toys are two-edge swords which can be used against us. They've certainly remade the face of asymmetric warfare and remoted-IED's are responsible for the majority of our losses, injuries, and long-term costs of the current wars. They do the same on the terrorist front (played a big role in the Mumbai attack for instance).

They're part of an NSA spy ring dedicated to spying on Americans.

Huh, on what f*#king planet is that? They are a commercial entity that has been compelled by the government - under the powers vested by the Patriot Act's business records provision - to comply with orders to allow access to their clickstream and analyses.

I mean, that's what Google is, its what that company does...quibble as to commercial vs. government, the apparatus of google is built to spy on people, simple as that, built from the ground up for that specific purpose, to sell the data. So they sold some to the government - this is a surprise?

No, that's not what google is. They do sell data to advertisers. they did not sell any data to the government. I expect a little more precision from someone who does what you do for a living.

Not one person here has hit on the real facts yet.

Again, on what planet? Oh, that's right, planet Vedas where all the answers are carved in stone reliefs and pre-ordained.

Snowden sold out to CHINA.

Ron, dude, at this point I'm pretty sure one of the US cartel gangs has a low-dose LSD drip hooked up to your water supply. Man, if you keep reading one crank, nutjob blog and website after another you are going to be even more completely lost and drama-queened out then you already are. You're definitely getting crowned the reigning ST political Queen.

The United States is not at war, not constitutionally. Congress declined to exercise its duty in the matter.

This is also spot on and that's really been the case since Nixon and why the War Powers Resolution was enacted over Nixon's veto. The WPR wasn't the best response to those abuses and has caused no shortage of problems of it's own. I've laid out my own thoughts here on what 'war powers' the president should have and what would have to happen for the US to actually engage in any significant military conflict.

What is Iran the boogeyman? Of COURSE the US is spying on Iran and China, hacking away at their systems even as they try to hack away at ours.

This is another example of the Internet forever changing the face of societies and 'war'. There are national, extra-national, commercial, military, criminal, and individual entities engaged in digital piracy of any and all forms you can think of. Until we redesign computing and networking down to the chip level for secure and verifiable systems and messaging (more security at a high price) all nations, corporations, and individuals will be in a continual state of cyber warfare. Unlike the drug war, this one is very, very real.

The fact he ran to China, however, does suggest treason, agreed.

I'd think someone who's traveled as much as you would realize that, even after going back to the Chinese, Hong Kong is still a great place to make connections. I can't say I would have announced there, but this is another case of the Internet really shrinking the planet and options for someone in Snowden's position. I mean, even Lesotho, Lichtenstein and Tonga all have extradition treaties with the US. Jumping from HK to the Maldives would have been an option, but once in the Maldives you're pretty much not going anywhere else and are permanently in a goldfish bowl.

It is a complete mistake to think the government is only looking at metadata. They are looking at much more than that.

They are looking at the metadata without warrants under Patriot Act authorization. If they see a pattern in the data they don't like you can bet they issue a warrant for the associated content and I suspect those warrants cover large buckets of data, not thimblefuls.

the fisa courts were created to prevent exactly what the fisa courts are now doing

That is not the case. It may feel that way in 'spirit', but that is not an accurate characterization of either the warranting or the oversight.

Regardless, a traitor is someone that steals intel then SELLS it to the competition. Manning and this latest jerk did exactly that. They didnt just volunteer it up for the good of man,, noooo they had an auction and gave it to the highest bidder.

Ron. See above post and, please, get back on your meds - for the children if no one else.

All I've seen is Snowden merely saying, “We hack network backbones – like huge internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one."

Huh, on what f*#king planet is that? They are a commercial entity that has been compelled by the government - under the powers vested by the Patriot Act's business records provision - to comply with orders to allow access to their clickstream and analyses.

his is another example of the Internet forever changing the face of societies and 'war'. There are national, extra-national, commercial, military, criminal, and individual entities engaged in digital piracy

Google didn't know your porn preferences either, at first. It's part of the big data learning curve of the last 10-15 years. That uncertainty is also why communications monitoring is paired with expanding radiation monitoring coverage. The question isn't do they know everything or can in fact detect such an attack, but rather should they try. It's actually a pretty stark choice - there is no 'sort of try' when it comes to this sort of thing - it's either do or don't. And if the answer is don't, then that decision is not necessarily without serious consequences of its own.

The Honorable Darrell Issa
Chairman, House Committee on Government Reform & Oversight
2157 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515

Chairman Issa:

Thank you for your ongoing efforts to investigate abuses of civil liberties by employees of the Internal Revenue Service.

These abuses seem to indicate a larger, higher pattern of ideologically-driven harassment of Americans which Congress has an obligation to fully investigate with every tool at our disposal.

Frankly I am disappointed by revelations Obama administration personnel have been less than forward about what they knew and when they knew it.

As you know, recent revelations show the National Security Agency has been keeping an “ongoing, daily” log of every domestic phone call in the United States.

I respectfully request your Committee subpoena the records of every phone call made from all public and private telephones of all IRS personnel to all public and private telephones of all White House personnel.

If President Obama is collecting such information, he certainly would want us to use it. If he has nothing to hide he has nothing to be afraid of.

WASHINGTON – Congressman Steve Stockman (R-Texas 36) Tuesday asked the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee to subpoena all National Security Agency records of phone calls between employees of the White House and the Internal Revenue Service.

Stockman’s office hand delivered a letter Tuesday afternoon to the Committee’s office requesting a subpoena “of all records of every phone call made from all public and private telephones of all IRS personnel to all public and private telephones of all White House personnel” collected under the NSA’s recently-revealed PRISM program.

“Obama assures the public he only collected this information to uncover wrongdoing and protect civil liberties. Clearly he would want us to use it to investigate this case, because otherwise he’d be lying,” said Stockman.

“If Obama has nothing to hide he has nothing to fear,” said Stockman.

“This case must be investigated fully, given admitted wrongdoing by the IRS, its potentially criminal implications and revelations the White House has been less than honest about what they knew and when,” said Stockman. “Obama says the PRISM program is perfectly legal, so there should be no problem whatsoever in providing the information on White House and IRS phone calls.”

“The only possible scenario in which the administration refuses to comply would be if it would reveal unconstitutional or illegal behavior,” said Stockman.

Stockman’s office also electronically delivered the same letter to the Homeland Security Committee chaired by Rep. Michael McCaul. The text of the letter follows:

Whether we believe this or not regarding events of the last dozen years on US soil, there is no arguing against the fact that the USA has a core commitment and has been instrumental across the globe in perpetrating, aiding,and supporting terrorism, war, repression, tyrannical dictatorships, mass murder, assassination, death squad training, torture, economic warfare, and all other manner of behavior in order to control the interests of it's ruling class.

For example, one need only examine an FBI program like COINTELPRO to get a dose of how that repression and violence has already been directed towards USA citizens. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

Are we going to believe that the entire population of the USA citizenry or various demographics thereof are entirely immune from the receiving end of such a nefarious ideology because of the existence of few sheets of parchment scratched out over 200 year ago?

Then M40s somehow came into the hands of rebels in Libya and Syria. Suddenly, the 106mm – light, cheap, easily transportable, simple to operate, and packing a punch all out of proportion to its modest size — has emerged as a possible Great Asymmetric Weapon of the Day.

"In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden's whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an "executive coup" against the US constitution.

Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended.

The government claims it has a court warrant under Fisa – but that unconstitutionally sweeping warrant is from a secret court, shielded from effective oversight, almost totally deferential to executive requests. As Russell Tice, a former National Security Agency analyst, put it: "It is a kangaroo court with a rubber stamp.""

You might know Hedges, but Stone is a highly credentialed law professor and he certainly knows is stuff. He is able to define, without defending, the laws that come into play, as well as how civil liberties are involved. No matter what side of the fence you find yourself on, you will learn something here.

One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Snowden’s historic leak revealed what he calls an “architecture of oppression”—a series of top-secret surveillance programs that go far beyond what has been publicly known to date. The first was an order from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court requesting a division of the phone giant Verizon to hand over “all call detail records” for calls from the U.S. to locations abroad, or all calls within the U.S., including local calls. In other words, metadata for every phone call that Verizon Business Network Services processed was to be delivered to the NSA on a daily basis. Another document was a slide presentation revealing a program dubbed “PRISM,” which allegedly empowers NSA snoops access to all the private data stored by Internet giants like Microsoft, AOL, Skype, Google, Apple and Facebook, including email, video chats, photos, files transfers and more.

Snowden released Presidential Policy Directive 20—a top-secret memo from President Barack Obama directing U.S. intelligence agencies to draw up a list of targets for U.S. cyberattacks. Finally came proof of the program called “Boundless Informant,” which creates a global “heat map” detailing the source countries of the 97 billion intercepted electronic records collected by the NSA in the month of March 2013. Among the top targets were Iran, Pakistan, Egypt and Jordan. The leaked map color-codes countries: red for “hot,” then yellow and green. Last March, the U.S. was yellow, providing the NSA with close to 2.9 billion intercepts.

I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects. This is in connection with the discussion of the role of “metadata” in certain recent events and the assurances of various respectable parties that the government was merely “sifting through this so-called metadata” and that the “information acquired does not include the content of any communications”. I will show how we can use this “metadata” to find key persons involved in terrorist groups operating within the Colonies at the present time. I shall also endeavour to show how these methods work in what might be called a relational manner.

Why has the government kept this unilateral surveillance of USA citizens secret and private? If the government truly believes that spying on all USA citizens is necessary for our security, why then didn't the government just inform us of this? From the perspective of practical utility - the actual ostensible intelligence gathering related to 'terrorism' - it makes no difference whether the public knows about it or not... so why then the secrecy?

I come back to the notion of a nation of 'rulers and their subjects' (for example the political situation before the American Revolution) vs. a nation of citizens. We are being treated like subjects.

Thank you Mr. Snowden for having the both the conscience and balls to see this thing through. No doubt it's an immensely heroic deed.

"In A Time Of Universal Deceit, Telling The Truth Is A Revolutionary Act."
-Orwell

PS: thanks for the Christopher Hedges vs. Stone debate link upthread. Hedges is another bold voice in the sea of deceit, always willing to state that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

I could care less about the government functionaries and their apologists declaiming that all this unilateral spying on USA citizens is 'legal'. Even if it were 'technically legal' that changes absolutely nothing.

“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”
-Martin Luther King Jr.

We didn't know until recently that all USA citizens unilaterally have been spied on for several years and the data stored. Why not inform us that the entire USA population is being spied on? Why the secrecy? What does keeping it secret alter?

We didn't know until recently that all USA citizens unilaterally have been spied on for several years and the data stored. Why not inform us that the entire USA population is being spied on? Why the secrecy? What does keeping it secret alter?

Because you have misstated it. Americans were not being spied on. The program only served to preserve the records. Nothing else. Nobody looked at anything.

To access the data, you had to have a SECOND court order.

If you came up with a possible phone number, you had to have a THIRD court order to find out who the number belonged to.

Of course we are being spied on, there's no other sensible reason why it's being done in secrecy.
Six degrees of separation. All the government needs is a single name and your metadata is now entangled in of a networked web under closer scrutiny, examining your social networks, alliances, groups, communication patterns, etc.. Based on the sheer volume of each US citizen's intercepted and collected data daily for the past seven years, I'd hazard a guess that the USA government already has highly detailed profiles mapped of all USA citizens.

The FISA court is secret, the orders are secret, no FOIA, and the court is effectively a rubber stamp for the executive branch. There are no effective checks and balances in place whatsoever.

I'm curious at what point along the chain our data is being intercepted?
If I email someone is the data being monitored before it reaches my intended destination, i.e. is the NSA installing a collection point through which my data must pass before reaching a destination? Or even before my communication reaches my ISP?

At your telco and ISP. Logging happens as your call or email transits, metadata harvesting likely happens either near real-time as streaming data or in relatively short intervals as, with this amount of data, you really can't afford to get behind.

What does it take to qualify for a high level position on Barry's security team.

Meet the new #2 at the CIA

Haines was 24 years old, she dropped out of a graduate program in physics at John Hopkins University and opened a waterfront bookstore in Baltimore. The store “turned into the regular meeting place of a small group of erotica aficionados,” where Haines held a monthly erotica reading.

Haines would set the mood for the readings. For example, in preparation for one session, “she placed red candles throughout her store,” then “got pulses racing” by reading the following:

“In the topmost bed chamber of the house (the prince) found her. He had stepped over sleeping chambermaids and valets, and, breathing the dust and damp of the place, he finally stood in the door of her sanctuary. And approaching her, he gave a soft gasp as he touched her cheek, and her teeth through her parted lips, and then her tender rounded eyelids.”

Haines has taken part in “virtually every senior-level meeting at the president’s National Security Council over the past two years.”

She has never worked in the intelligence agency in which she will soon hold the No. 2 role

At your telcom and ISP. Logging happens as your call or email transits, metadata harvesting likely happens either near real-time as streaming data or in relatively short intervals as, with this amount of data, you really can't afford to get behind.

What's the 'secret' room that the NSA has built inside various telecom companies? Are calls, emails, et al routed to the NSA's 'secret' operation's room before reaching their intended destination?

I'm curious about the law. There's all this talk about it all being legal because the data isn't private as a third party is involved, Verizon for example.

What if the NSA is intercepting our data before it reaches the third party's infrastructure?

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."
If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA's formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.

Does anyone find it suspicious that when ever something like this happens, that puts an eye on the gov't secret actions and scandals against the public, they always seem to come up with some national threat or global conflict.

With in a week, they pumped syria, even though rumors of chemical weapons have been happening for a year. All of unconfirmed evidence.

What's the 'secret' room that the NSA has built inside various telecom companies? Are calls, emails, et al routed to the NSA's 'secret' operation's room before reaching their intended destination?

Lovegasoline, the Mark Klein documents (AT&T technician) show the use of optical splitters, that essentially "mirror" the data. One side goes off to the intended destination and the other side to the NSA's Naurus boxes. They supposedly don't use Naurus anymore, which filtered data more specifically...... instead they grab everything.

The Mark Klein docs, that Wired released in 2006, are not easy to find online... to my surprise, most have been redacted, even on the EFF site. They are still on the Wayback Machine here, though:

It was the wonderful "Patriot" Act, hurriedly pushed through congress in the wake of 9/11 that authorized these domestic "activities." Strange thing is.. none of the Senators or House members read ANY of this sh#t. It had been prepared long in advance, and sat waiting for the proper incident that would allow rapid passage.

If they're currently using optical splitters, then that would imply they streaming whole content, not metadata, to NSA storage and analysis servers and generating their own metadata there (//as opposed to using the telco / ISP metadata//). If they were really persisting that content on NSA storage servers, it would seem odd they'd then have issue warrants for that same content from the likes of At&T, Microsoft, facebook, and google, even as a formality. The odds are better they generate their own medata data and discard the actual content stream after doing so.

Leon Edward Panetta (born June 28, 1938) is an American politician, lawyer and professor. He served in the Barack Obama administration as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2009 to 2011 and as Secretary of Defense from 2011 to 2013. An Italian-American Democrat, Panetta was a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1977 to 1993, served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1993 to 1994 and as President Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff from 1994 to 1997. He is the founder of the Panetta Institute for Public Policy, served as Distinguished Scholar to Chancellor Charles B. Reed of the California State University System and professor of public policy at Santa Clara University.

Haines

Haines, 43, instead had a stint as an urban entrepreneur, running Adrian’s Book Café — named for her late mother — for several years between graduating from University of Chicago and moving on to law school at Georgetown. During those years, she served as president of the Fells Point Business Association, according to Baltimore Sun stories at the time, and was active in the neighborhood preservation society.

And then there were the times that Adrian’s welcomed patrons for the occasional readings of high-toned erotica over chicken tostadas,

Those are two distinct things. The top "UPSTREAM" graphic depicts what we discussed earlier - optical taps on some of the world's main optical fiber trunks. The lower would be access to telcos/ISPs/Social Media Cos metadata .

Taps on the main optical fiber trunks would be attempting to do packet analysis and generate metadata off of it in more or less real time. The NSA didn't and undoubtedly doesn't have the storage capacity to store the content off such trunks beyond some selective and highly-targeted packet streams - it's too much data and really they probably aren't capable of generating real-time metadata against the full trunk capacity either.

The news sources he went to have done a disservice to Snowden and to the public.

Let's see all 41 of the Powerpoint slides that Snowden intended for us to see: apparently he edited the slides down to 41 in number in order to a.) protect the secrecy of certain sensitive material, and b.) to share with the public the actual full extent and scope of what the government is doing. Snowden risked his life and freedom to get this info where it belongs, in the public's eye. The news sources that he went to are too cowardly to publish it.

Snowden's crux is his stressing the eventuality, or even the inevitability of 'Turnkey Tyranny' based on the unconstitutional domestic spying and surveillance network now in operation at the NSA.
Until we see all those 41 slides - instead of the mere handful that the news sources have already released - we are not getting the full reality of the 'Turnkey Tyranny' that motivated Snowden to take such huge risks as a whistle blower.

The news agencies are now involved in a cover-up operation.
We don't need to see 36 more slides which are decoys/misinformation and have been crafted by the CIA to serve as crisis management props; we need to see all those slides Snowden wanted us to see and get confirmation from Snowden that the published material is indeed accurate.

..The NSA didn't and undoubtedly doesn't have the storage capacity to store the content off such trunks beyond some selective and highly-targeted packet streams - it's too much data and really they probably aren't capable of generating real-time metadata against the full trunk capacity either.

healyje, here's an excerpt from Bill Binney, former NSA technical director, on capabilities of the new Utah Data Center, in Bluffdale, opening this September.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Binney, could you say a little more about Bluffdale, this site in Utah that’s being built right now? I don’t think most people are aware of it.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, what they’re putting together there in Bluffdale is a million-square-foot storage facility, of which only 100,000 is really going to have equipment to store data. But the rest of it, the peripherals, then are power generation, cooling and so on. So, but in there, there’s 100,000 square feet of storage capacity. And at current capabilities that are advertised on the web with Cleversafe.com, they can put 10 exabytes in about 200 feet—square feet of storage space in 21 racks. What that means is, when you divide that out, is you—that even at current capacity to store information, that’s five zettabytes that they can put in into Bluffdale. And if you—and my estimate of the data they would be collecting, which would include the targeted audio and perhaps all of the text in the world, that would be on the order of 20 terabytes a minute—or, yeah, 20 terabytes a minute. So if you figure out from that how much they could collect, it would be like 500 years of the world’s communications. But I only estimated a hundred, because really they want space for parallel processors to go at cryptanalysis and breaking codes. So—

To preserve any hope of salvaging the constitution and a democratic nation, we should work towards getting a court ruling to have all the data collected on US citizens over the past seven years, as well as any and all analytical data related to that data, destroyed. Simultaneously,make massive changes to the Patriot Act to bring it more in line with the Constitution.

The people responsible for this spying should be brought to justice and/or impeached.

kunlun_shan, sorry, I wasn't clear enough, they don't have the sufficient storage capacity local to the fiber optic trunk taps (or wherever an optical splitter would terminate) to capture the content; they probably don't have enough to even buffer sufficiently for packet analysis of the entire trunk in realtime.

And even if Bluffdale is using CleverSafe archive boxes (which they undoubtedly are given their board) with 1-TBS ingest boxes fronting them for say a 5-10 TBS combined facility ingest rate, you'd still have to get raw trunk data to it and that's pretty damn hard to do in the middle of Utah. Maybe if you built a Bluffdale at each of say a dozen submarine cable landing sites you could probably do it given those cables top out around 3.2 TBS last I saw. But you'd also have the issue of how fast you can do deep packet inspection / information extraction. And then there's doing high-level intelligence analysis that could even begin to keep up with a trunk's datastream - unlikely.

But, if the arrows on that chart and the size of the cooling systms on the Bluffdale schematic are to be believed, then Bluffdale looks rather more CPU than storage intensive and I'm guessing it's a high-level intelligence analytics [Hadoop] data center which all the other facilities are going to be forwarding pre-screened/processed data to.

Simultaneously, make massive changes to the Patriot Act to bring it more in line with the Constitution.

You'd need a Supreme Court without Roberts and Alito on it to do that and they were picked as supportive of expansive executive powers and young for a reason.

The people responsible for this spying should be brought to justice and/or impeached.

Well, they're not in office anymore and the ones who are have legal cover provided by the ones who aren't. Then again, John Yoo is at Berkeley and someone should 'get' him for his perverse interpretations of the constitution. But do you then disagree with this assertion of his which I posted a ways back and which likely underpins the 'logic' of the Patriot Act given he's one the principle authors?:

From a Frontline interview with John Yoo on 1/10/2007:

Frontline: And gathering intelligence then means gathering intelligence at home as well as abroad.

Yoo: I think that's right. Again, if you're going to gather intelligence and follow members of Al Qaeda outside the United States, you don't want to make the United States some kind of safe haven where once they cross the borders into our country it actually becomes harder to find them and track them down. That would be perverse; exactly the reverse kind of powers that you want our government to have when it's fighting especially this kind of enemy, which tries to infiltrate our borders and launch surprise attacks.

P.S. The commercial fiber corridor going by Bluffdale probably operates near capacity and that brings up an aspect of all this that doesn't get press as it's more technical in nature. But one can assume the NSA has leased a bunch dark fiber to connect their facilities and has probably embarked on a simultaneous network build out to go along with this as the leased fiber isn't going to cut it from security or capacity perspectives. The only real question is are they piggy-backing on the defense network build out or building their own - I would guess the latter given the defense network will be subject to relentless attacks and have inadequate security at best.

I don't have to listen to your phone calls to know what you're doing. If I know every single phone call you've made, I'm able to determine every single person you talked to - I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive. And the real question here is what do they do with this information that they collect that does not have anything to do with al Qaeda? And we're gonna trust the President and the Vice President of the United States to do the right thing? Don't count me in on that.

I think what we have in Edward Snowden is just a narcissistic young man who has decided he is smarter than the rest of us. I don’t know what he is beyond that, but he is no hero.

This is a strawman fabricated from whole cloth and bears no resemblance to Snowden whatsoever.

From Snowden's interview with Greenwald:"I'm no different from anybody else. I don't have special skills. I'm just another guy who sits there day to day in the office, watches what's happening and goes, 'This is something that's not our place to decide, the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong.' And I'm willing to go on the record to defend the authenticity of them and say, 'I didn't change these, I didn't modify the story. This is the truth; this is what's happening. You should decide whether we need to be doing this.'"

The false allegation that Snowden is a narcissist is baseless. It's a transparent attempt to shift the focus away from the extremely serious and existential issue now facing this nation to killing the messenger. It's a grasping at straws.

What we are witnessing is a huge amount of people who are in denial. In denial that our government is composed of criminals who hold the constitution in contempt.

Denial yes, but not only denial. Also something else. Something more insidious. 'Doublethink' as Orwell so aptly described.

Also, I have no doubt an NSA analyst has the capability to tap any phone or go after any text, voicemail, or email - doing so on their own, or a supervisor's authority, without either a valid warrant or an order that is somehow a constitutionally-rooted, legal expression of executive power would be highly problematic.

The false allegation that Snowden is a narcissist is baseless. It's a transparent attempt to shift the focus away from the extremely serious and existential issue now facing this nation to killing the messenger. It's a grasping at straws.

Snowden will go down in history as a patriot, more so than some of the criminals who have held the highest offices in the US.

"It was seeing a continuing litany of lies from senior officials to Congress - and therefore the American people - and the realization that that Congress, specifically the Gang of Eight, wholly supported the lies that compelled me to act. Seeing someone in the position of James Clapper - the Director of National Intelligence - baldly lying to the public without repercussion is the evidence of a subverted democracy. The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed."

"Further, it's important to bear in mind I'm being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school."

"There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny - they should be setting the example of transparency."

"Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history."

"The US Person / foreigner distinction is not a reasonable substitute for individualized suspicion, and is only applied to improve support for the program. This is the precise reason that NSA provides Congress with a special immunity to its surveillance."

"First, the US Government, just as they did with other whistleblowers, immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home, openly declaring me guilty of treason and that the disclosure of secret, criminal, and even unconstitutional acts is an unforgivable crime. That's not justice, and it would be foolish to volunteer yourself to it if you can do more good outside of prison than in it."

"Second, let's be clear: I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting? So we can potentially reveal a potential terrorist with the potential to kill fewer Americans than our own Police? No, the public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the "consent of the governed" is meaningless."

"More fundamentally, the "US Persons" protection in general is a distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it's only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%. Our founders did not write that "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created equal.""

"Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now."

Thanks to everyone for their support, and remember that just because you are not the target of a surveillance program does not make it okay. The US Person / foreigner distinction is not a reasonable substitute for individualized suspicion, and is only applied to improve support for the program. This is the precise reason that NSA provides Congress with a special immunity to its surveillance.

Congress is immune from the surveillance. How convenient. The functionaries who are responsible for maintaining the secret spy program are not effected by it.

(CNN) -- Critics who have compared President Barack Obama's stance on government surveillance to that of hawkish former Vice President Dick Cheney are missing his insistence on proper systematic balances, Obama said in an interview that aired Monday.

Defending at length the recently revealed government programs that gather information about phone calls and Internet usage, Obama said his focus has always been on allowing information to be gathered while ensuring necessary oversight.

"Some people say, 'Well, you know, Obama was this raving liberal before. Now he's, you know, Dick Cheney.'" Obama told PBS' Charlie Rose. "Dick Cheney sometimes says, 'Yeah, you know? He took it all lock, stock, and barrel.' My concern has always been not that we shouldn't do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather are we setting up a system of checks and balances?"

Cheney defends NSA, calls Obama's credibility 'nonexistent'

Snowden: Hong Kong easiest answer

Edward Snowden: Hide and seek

Is the NSA leaker a spy?

Apple discloses data request numbers
Obama's administration has faced a litany of questions since the disclosure of government programs that allow the National Security Agency to collect millions of records from U.S. telecommunications firms and Internet companies in the name of preventing terrorism. The source of the information, former CIA employee Edward Snowden, said he was moved to leak the top-secret documents because he felt the government was far overreaching its constitutional bounds in collecting the data.

But Obama argued in the interview on Monday that the system in place includes steps to prevent Americans' rights against unlawful search and seizure from being violated.

"What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your e-mails," Obama said.

Snowden claims online Obama expanded 'abusive' security

"On this telephone program, you've got a federal court with independent federal judges overseeing the entire program," the president continued. "And you've got Congress overseeing the program, not just the intelligence committee and not just the judiciary committee, but all of Congress had available to it before the last reauthorization exactly how this program works."

Some members of Congress, including Senate Intelligence Committee members Jay Rockefeller and Susan Collins, have questioned the notion they were given proper briefings on the NSA's program, however, and many lawmakers have said they first learned of the programs when they were revealed in news reports two weeks ago.

CNN poll: Obama numbers plunge into generation gap

**Asked in the interview whether the NSA's process should be more open, Obama said, "It is transparent. That's why we set up the FISA court."

That body, however, operates in secret, and its locations are considered classified. It has approved the vast majority of the requests it has received for warrants, though those orders are also kept secret.**

An administration official said Monday that Obama had asked his intelligence chief James Clapper to determine whether additional information about the data collection programs can be made public, part of what the official described as a "broader effort the president is undertaking to have a dialogue on protecting privacy in the digital age."

The swirling debate is grist for a "national conversation" about privacy and national security, Obama said.

"Not only about these two programs, but also the general problem of data, big data sets, because this is not going to be restricted to government entities," he said.

see the bold stuff....how do you have a "transparent process" when it is classified? thats a new one.

Given the enormity of what you are facing now in terms of repercussions, can you describe the exact moment when you knew you absolutely were going to do this, no matter the fallout, and what it now feels like to be living in a post-revelation world? Or was it a series of moments that culminated in action? I think it might help other people contemplating becoming whistleblowers if they knew what the ah-ha moment was like. Again, thanks for your courage and heroism.

Snowden's answer:

I imagine everyone's experience is different, but for me, there was no single moment. It was seeing a continuing litany of lies from senior officials to Congress - and therefore the American people - and the realization that that Congress, specifically the Gang of Eight, wholly supported the lies that compelled me to act. Seeing someone in the position of James Clapper - the Director of National Intelligence - baldly lying to the public without repercussion is the evidence of a subverted democracy. The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.

1) Why did you choose Hong Kong to go to and then tell them about US hacking on their research facilities and universities?
2) How many sets of the documents you disclosed did you make, and how many different people have them? If anything happens to you, do they still exist?

Snowden's answer:

1) First, the US Government, just as they did with other whistleblowers, immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home, openly declaring me guilty of treason and that the disclosure of secret, criminal, and even unconstitutional acts is an unforgivable crime. That's not justice, and it would be foolish to volunteer yourself to it if you can do more good outside of prison than in it.

Second, let's be clear: I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting? So we can potentially reveal a potential terrorist with the potential to kill fewer Americans than our own Police? No, the public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the "consent of the governed" is meaningless.

2) All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.

Let’s place private corporations with government contracts under surveillance — to make sure no one is getting rich off our tax dollars.

By Sam Pizzigati

Only 23 percent of Americans, says a new Reuters poll, consider former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden a “traitor” for blowing the whistle on the federal government’s massive surveillance of the nation’s telecom system.

Booz Allen: leveraging the public purse for private gain.

Many Americans, the poll data suggest, clearly do find the idea of government agents snooping through their phone calls and emails a good bit unnerving.

But Americans have more on the surveillance front to worry about than overzealous government agents. Government personnel aren’t actually doing the snooping the 29-year-old Snowden revealed. NSA officials have contracted this snooping out — to private corporate contractors.

These surveillance contracts, in turn, are making contractor executives exceedingly rich. And none have profited personally more than the power suits who run Booz Allen Hamilton and the private equity Carlyle Group.

Whistle-blower Snowden did his snooping as a Booz Allen employee. Booz Allen, overall, has had tens of thousands of employees doing intelligence work for the federal government.

Booz Allen alumni also populate the highest echelons of America’s intelligence apparatus — and vice versa. The Obama administration’s top intelligence official, James Clapper, just happens to be a former Booz Allen exec. The George W. Bush intelligence chief, John McConnell, now serves as the Booz Allen vice chair.

All these revolving doors open up into enormously lucrative worlds. In their 2010 fiscal year, the top five Booz Allen execs together pocketed just under $20 million. They averaged 23 times what members of Congress take home.

In fiscal 2010, the top five Booz Allen execs took home just under $20 million.

But the real windfalls are flowing to top execs at the Carlyle Group, Booz Allen’s parent company since 2008. In 2011, Carlyle’s top three power suits shared a combined payday over $400 million.

More windfalls will be arriving soon. Carlyle paid $2.54 billion to buy up Booz Allen. Analysts are now expecting that Carlyle’s ultimate return on the acquisition will triple the private equity giant’s initial cash outlay.

What do all these mega millions have to do with the massive surveillance that Edward Snowden has so dramatically exposed? Washington power players, from the President on down, are insisting that this surveillance has one and only one purpose: keeping Americans safe from terrorism.

But who can put much faith in these earnest assurances when other motives — financial motives — so clearly seem at play?

Corporate execs at firms like Booz Allen and the Carlyle Group are making fortunes doing “systematic snooping” for the government. These execs have a vested self-interest in pumping up demand for their snooping services — and they’re indeed, the Washington Post reported last week, pumping away.

This past April, the Post notes, Booz Allen established a new 1,500-employee division “aimed at creating new products that clients (read: government agencies) don’t know they need yet.” This new division is developing “social media analytics” that can anticipate the latest “cyber threat.”

Private contractors like Booz Allen have a vested self-interest in pumping up demand for their snooping services.

In other words, this new unit will be figuring out how to get the federal government to pay up even more for investigating who we “like” on Facebook.

In one sense, none of this should surprise us. Corporate executives — particularly in the defense industry — have been enriching themselves off government contracts for years. Post-9/11 political dynamics have only turbocharged that process. America now sports, as Pulitzer Prize-winning analyst David Rohde observed last week, a “secrecy industrial complex.”

Do the Snowden revelations have the potential to upset Corporate America’s long-running government contracting gravy train? Maybe, but only if anger over the revelations translates into real changes that keep private corporate contractors from getting rich off tax dollars.

What might these changes entail? The Affordable Care Act enacted in 2010 — Obamacare — suggests one initial step. Under this new legislation, private health insurance companies can no longer deduct off their corporate income taxes any compensation over $500,000 that they pay their top executives.

A more potent antidote to contracting windfalls would be simply denying government contracts to corporations that overcompensate their top execs, a course of action U.S. senator Hugo Black from Alabama, later a noted Supreme Court justice, proposed back in the early years of the Great Depression.

How might this approach work today? The President of the United States makes about 25 times the compensation of the lowest-paid federal employee. We could apply that standard to federal contracting and deny our tax dollars to companies that pay their top execs over 25 times what any of their workers are making.

Protecting privacy in a dangerous world will never be easy. But we’ll never have even a shot at protecting privacy until we take the profit out of violating it. Ending windfalls for contractors would be the logical place to start.

Slightly OT, but has anybody seen the shitstorm that Democracy Now is breaking on Flight 800?
Yeowza!

... Obama added: "If people can't trust the executive branch, but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges ... then we're going to have some problems here."

Gosh sir, We the People have now learned that all three branches of government have furtively conspired for seven years to violate our privacy — so, no, we don't trust any of them. And, yes, that is a biiiiiiig problem.

It’s a fear. You don’t really cower under the desk.
But its a nagging fear, a trepidation.
Something that never goes away. Obama is watching you, monitoring
whatever you do.

If you make a mistake, you will pay for it. Eventually. Some day.
Your future is bleak.

Basically, you are being silenced. Everyone is. Purposefully or not, they are trying to shut you down and shut you up.

They say they’re not, but they are.
They say they don’t believe they are, but they are.
They have protective password mechanisms in place, but who has access? Someday your enemies will.

We have to rely on the beneficence of our overseers, but only a fool should rest easy.
How can we believe in anything? Everything is too big. We are just cogs in
the big wheel of the surveillence state.

And here’s the big problem: it’s only getting worse as every little
detail is being recorded into the searchable database.

So live in fear. There is a Bad Santa watching you. And he decides if
you've been bad or good.

"The Fisa court's oversight role has been referenced many times by Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials as they have sought to reassure the public about surveillance, but the procedures approved by the court have never before been publicly disclosed.

The top secret documents published today detail the circumstances in which data collected on US persons under the foreign intelligence authority must be destroyed, extensive steps analysts must take to try to check targets are outside the US, and reveals how US call records are used to help remove US citizens and residents from data collection.

However, alongside those provisions, the Fisa court-approved policies allow the NSA to:

• Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up to five years;

• Retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;

• Access the content of communications gathered from "U.S. based machine[s]" or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the US, for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance.

The broad scope of the court orders, and the nature of the procedures set out in the documents, appear to clash with assurances from President Obama and senior intelligence officials that the NSA could not access Americans' call or email information without warrants."

"Asked about US surveillance programmes in an earlier interview with a Spanish technology news site, FayerWayer, Steve Wozniak said: "All these things about the constitution, that made us so good as people – they are kind of nothing.

"They are all dissolved with the Patriot Act. There are all these laws that just say 'we can secretly call anything terrorism and do anything we want, without the rights of courts to get in and say you are doing wrong things'. There's not even a free open court any more. Read the constitution. I don't know how this stuff happened. It's so clear what the constitution says."

He said he had been brought up to believe that "communist Russia was so bad because they followed their people, they snooped on them, they arrested them, they put them in secret prisons, they disappeared them – these kinds of things were part of Russia. We are getting more and more like that.""

Seeing someone in the position of James Clapper - the Director of National Intelligence - baldly lying to the public without repercussion is the evidence of a subverted democracy.

Not just lying to the public but lying to Congress, which is supposed to oversee them! Why doesn't he go to jail instead? How would we know he was lying without a whistleblower. Kill the messenger? Screw that~! Even Clinton got impeached for lying to congress about a MUCH smaller issue

whats this?
President 'Leak Plugger's unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider
Threat Program gives the NSA authority to increase monitoring of all
communications to hunt down leakers.

"Hammer this fact home . . . leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies
of the United States,” says a June 1, 2012, Defense Department
oberfurher on strategy for the program.

Requires federal employees to snitch on co-workers. Failure to do so is
now a crime and if the cubical worker across the aisle from you leaks to
the media you could go to jail for not catching him and alerting the
department manager.

So best not to talk to anyone in the office so you have plausible
deniability of not knowing anything, just like the administration.

You have stepped thru the looking glass when it makes perfect sense to get
jail time for not being a mind reader. What school teaches that course btw? Got to sign up.

Hey, let’s get people to snitch on their coworkers.

The only thing they haven’t done here is reward it,” said Kel McClanahan,
a Washington lawyer who specializes in national security law.

I’m waiting for the time when you turn in your manager andget a $500 reward and take over his job with a higher salary.Sweet!

in case there is any doubt about obama's "evolution." this is from 2007:

obama now equates secret courts making sweeping decisions affecting millions of americans with "transparency." and that's only to focus on what has been confirmed.

i apologize, in advance, for the following rant directed at the american citizen who assumes, without trial, what their gov't tells them: that snowden is a "traitor." my problem is, i have found the u.s. to be such an incredible and inspirational country with regard to much of its history, its land and its people, that it's hard to not have a fair bit of vitriol when it comes to commenting on the path american leaders have led the american public down post 9/11.

<rant>

i read a der spiegel editorialist who made the following obvious but important point within this context: "The US is, for the time being, the only global power -- and as such it is the only truly sovereign state in existence. All others are dependent -- either as enemies or allies."

if you believe that the head of the current u.s. corporatocracy is concerned about this leak because its spying capabilities were exposed to either china, or europe, or even "al queda" you are being played for a fool.

if you don't think the chinese elite knew about what the nsa was capable of, again, wake the f*#k up. china had what was thought to be the largest and most sophisticated state wide censorship and spying infrastructure on the planet. the only reason i put that in the past tense, is because it turns out the u.s. is giving them a real run for their money for the title of "largest and most sophisticated."

and i guarantee osama, et al weren't going to the trouble of using memory keys and runners, because they underestimated the capabilities of the u.s. military/intelligence complex.

no, the primary reason obama, et al are going and will go after snowden with every tool in their toolbox [smear campaigns, legal and possibly even extra legal methods] is that he exposed this to the american public.

because, at this point, the ONLY viable threat to the ruling power structure of the world's sole superpower, is you: the american public.

and while i hate to channel my inner palin, if you think that the bush/obama "led" empire's primary concern is main street, just look at who got bailed out and is already prospering, and who didn't and is still paying for the most recent crisis.

if the american public shoots the messenger and allows snowden to go down, you will prove deserving of everything that is being done to you and will continue to be done to you.

and if the above doesn't make any sense to you, it's okay, just repeat after me:

The guy is exposing the corruption that is government surveillance.
Do you want CCTV cameras on every street corner? There are plans to have light poles with cameras and microphones on said, every street corner.
Do you want to live in the reality that is 1984? What?

Everyone knows the telcos and ISP's (same thing) are already using all your data for commercial and marketing purposes. Why is that OK, but using it for counter-terrorism intel isn't?

It's not "OK". Not for telcos, nor for counter-terrorism.

NSA surveillance is an attack on the Fourth Amendment.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

TGT: This facility was built completely under King Barry's reign. He didn't stop it did he?

This is a BushCo facility and Obama had no power to stop its construction other than not signing intelligence appropriation bills. We've been over all this ground already.

NWO: Why do you hate America, Joe? North Korea will gladly take you in.

Dude, you have such a weak grasp on what America, Communism, and Fascism 'are' that you probably shouldn't get in over your head with North Korea. I will say, however, I'm beginning to detect a few similarities between you and Kim Jong-un (other than the fact Jong-un is clearly better educated).

"The fall-out from Snowden's leaks continued to stir the surveillance debate in the UK, with Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, insisting David Cameron or the foreign secretary, William Hague, should address MPs.

On Friday, the Guardian revealed GCHQ has put taps on some of the cables that carry internet traffic in and out of the UK, and has developed a storage system - codenamed Tempora - that can keep the information for up to 30 days.

The programme, which has not been disclosed before, allows GCHQ to keep a vast amount of emails and telephone calls for analysis.

Chakrabarti said: "The authorities appear to be kidding themselves with a very generous interpretation of the law that cannot stand with article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

"Revelations of blanket surveillance of the British public on such a scale amount to a huge scandal even by the standards of recent years. At the very least, the prime minister or foreign secretary should appear before the House of Commons immediately to explain how this was justified without clear legal authority or parliamentary debate.""